piled high with feminine garments, a sewing-machine, old dusty books, and a broken-down perambulator occupying most of the space.  I never could understand why the perambulator was there, as the Markovitches had no children.  Nicolai Leontievitch sat at a table under the little window, and his favourite position was to sit with the chair perched on one leg and so, rocking in this insecure position, he brooded over his bottles and glasses and trays.  This room was so dark even in the middle of the day that he was often compelled to use a lamp.  There he hovered, with his ragged beard, his ink-stained fingers and his red-rimmed eyes, making strange noises to himself and envolving from his materials continual little explosions that caused him infinite satisfaction.  He did not mind interruptions, nor did he ever complain of the noise in the other room, terrific though it often was.  He would be absorbed, in a trance, lost in another world, and surely amiable and harmless enough.  And yet not entirely amiable.  His eyes would close to little spots of dull, lifeless colour—­the only thing alive about him seemed to be his hands that moved and stirred as though they did not belong to his body at all, but had an independent existence of their own—­and his heels protruding from under his chair were like horrid little animals waiting, malevolently, on guard.

His inventions were, of course, never successful, and he contributed, therefore, nothing to the maintenance of his household.  Vera Michailovna had means of her own, and there were also the paying guests.  But he suffered from no sense of distress at his impecuniosity.  I discovered very quickly that Vera Michailovna kept the family purse, and one of the earliest sources of family trouble was, I fancy, his constant demands for money.  Before the war he had, I believe, been drunk whenever it was possible.  Because drink was difficult to obtain, and in a flood of patriotism roused by the enthusiasm of the early days of the war, he declared himself a teetotaller, and marvellously he kept his vows.  This abstinence was now one of his greatest prides, and he liked to tell you about it.  Nevertheless he needed money as badly as ever, and he borrowed whenever he could.  One of the first things that Vera Michailovna told me was that I was on no account to open my purse to him.  I was not always able to keep my promise.

On this particular evening of Bohun’s arrival I came, by invitation, to supper.  They had told me about their Englishman, and had asked me indeed to help the first awkward half-hour over the stile.  It may seem strange that the British Embassy should have chosen so uncouth a host as Nicolai Leontievitch for their innocent secretaries, but it was only the more enterprising of the young men who preferred to live in a Russian family; most of them inhabited elegant flats of their own, ornamented with coloured stuffs and gaily decorated cups and bright trays from the Jews’ Market, together with English comforts