“Ah, Mr. Durward,” he said, trotting forward.  “Good health to you!  What excellent weather we’re sharing.”

“So we are, M. Semyonov,” I answered him.  “Although it did rain most of yesterday you know.  But weather of the soul perhaps you mean?  In that case I’m very glad to hear that you are well.”

“Ah—­of the soul?” He always spoke his words very carefully, clipping and completing them, and then standing back to look at them as though they were china ornaments arranged on a shining table.  “No—­my soul to-day is not of the first rank, I’m afraid.”

It was obvious that he was in a state of the very greatest excitement; he could not keep still, but walked up and down beside the long table, fingering the knives and forks.

Then Nina burst in upon us in one of her frantic rages.  Her tempers were famous both for their ferocity and the swiftness of their passing.  In the course of them she was like some impassioned bird of brilliant plumages, tossing her feathers, fluttering behind the bars of her cage at some impertinent, teasing passer-by.  She stood there now in the doorway, gesticulating with her hands.

“Nu, Tznaiesh schto? Michael Alexandrovitch has put me off—­says he is busy all night at the office.  He busy all night!  Don’t I know the business he’s after?  And it’s the third time—­I won’t see him again—­no, I won’t.  He—­”

“Good-evening, Nina Michailovna,” I said, smiling.  She turned to me.

“Durdles—­Mr. Durdles—­only listen.  It was all arranged for to-night—­the Parisian, and then we were to come straight back—­”

“But your guest—­” I began.

However the torrent continued.  The door opened and Boris Grogoff came in.  Instantly she turned upon him.

“There’s your fine friend!” she cried; “Michael Alexandrovitch isn’t coming.  Put me off at the last moment, and it’s the third time.  And I might have gone to Musikalnaya Drama.  I was asked by—­”

“Well, why not?” Grogoff interrupted calmly.  “If he had something better to do—­”

Then she turned upon him, screaming, and in a moment they were at it, tooth and nail, heaping up old scores, producing fact after fact to prove, the one to the other, false friendship, lying manners, deceitful promises, perjured records.  Vera tried to interrupt, Markovitch said something, I began a remonstrance—­in a moment we were all at it, and the room was a whirl of noise.  In the tempest it was only I who heard the door open.  I turned and saw Henry Bohun standing there.

I smile now when I think of that moment of his arrival, go fitting to the characters of the place, so appropriate a symbol of what was to come.  Bohun was beautifully dressed, spotlessly neat, in a bowler hat a little to one side, a light-blue silk scarf, a dark-blue overcoat.  His face wore an expression of dignified self-appreciation.  It was as though he stood there breathing blessings on the house that he had sanctified by his arrival.  He looked, too, with it all, such a boy that my heart was touched.  And there was something good and honest about his eyes.