Vera looked at Nina, then suddenly turned and burying her head in her hands sobbed, crouching in her chair.  Then slipping from the chair, knelt catching Nina’s knees, her head against her dress.

Nina was aghast, terrified—­then in a moment overwhelmed by a surging flood of love so that she caught Vera to her, caressing her hair, calling her by her little name, kissing her again and again and again.

“Verotchka—­Verotchka—­I didn’t mean anything.  I didn’t indeed.  I love you.  I love you.  You know that I do.  I was only angry and wicked.  Oh, I’ll never forgive myself.  Verotchka—­get up—­don’t kneel to me like that...!”

She was interrupted by a knock on the outer hall door.  To both of them that sound must have been terribly alarming.  Vera said afterwards, that “at once we realised that it was the knock of some one more frightened than we were.”

In the first place, no one ever knocked, they always rang the rather rickety electric bell—­and then the sound was furtive and hurried, and even frantic; “as though,” said Vera, “some one on the other side of the door was breathless.”

The sisters stood, close together, for quite a long time without moving.  The knocking ceased and the room was doubly silent.  Then suddenly it began again, very rapid and eager, but muffled, almost as though some one were knocking with a gloved hand.

Vera went then.  She paused for a moment in the little hall, for again there was silence and she fancied that perhaps the intruder had given up the matter in despair.  But, no—­there it was again—­and this third time seemed to her, perhaps because she was so close to it, the most urgent and eager of all.  She went to the door and opened it.  There was no light in the passage save the dim reflection from the lamp on the lower floor, and in the shadow she saw a figure cowering back into the corner behind the door.

“Who is it?” she asked.  The figure pushed past her, slipping into their own little hall.

“But you can’t come in like that,” she said, turning round on him.

“Shut the door!” he whispered. “Bozhe moi!  Bozhe moi....  Shut the door.”

She recognised him then.  He was the policeman from the corner of their street, a man whom they knew well.  He had always been a pompous little man, stout and short of figure, kindly so far as they knew, although they had heard of him as cruel in the pursuit of his official duties.  They had once talked to him a little and he explained:  “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, God knows,” he had said, “of myself, but a man likes to do his work efficiently—­and there are so many lazy fellows about here.”

He prided himself, they saw, on a punctilious attention to duty.  When he had to come there for some paper or other he was always extremely polite, and if they were going away he helped them about their passports.  He told them on another occasion that “he was pleased with life—­although one never knew of course when it might come down upon one—­”