“What did she see?”

“I don’t know.  That’s what she told me.”

Vera did a strange thing.  She laughed.

“They can all know.  I don’t care.  I want them to know.  Nina can tell them all.”

“Tell them what?”

“Oh, you’ll hear with the rest.  Uncle Alexei has done this.  He told Nina because he hates me.  He won’t rest until he ruins us all.  But I don’t care.  He can’t take from me what I’ve got.  He can’t take from me what I’ve got....  But we must get her back, Ivan Andreievitch.  She must come back—­”

Nicholas came in and then Semyonov and then Bohun.

Bohun, drawing me aside, whispered to me:  “Can I come and see you?  I must ask your advice—­”

“To-morrow evening,” I told him, and left.

Next day I was ill again.  I had I suppose done too much the day before.  I was in bed alone all day.  My old woman had suddenly returned without a word of explanation or excuse.  She had not, I am sure, even got so far as the Moscow Province.  I doubt whether she had even left Petrograd.  I asked her no questions.  I could tell of course that she had been drinking.  She was a funny old creature, wrinkled and yellow and hideous, very little different in any way from a native in the wilds of Central Africa.  The savage in her liked gay colours and trinkets, and she would stick flowers in her hair and wear a tinkling necklace of bright red and blue beads.  She had a mangy dog, hairless in places and rheumy at the eyes, who was all her passion, and this creature she would adore, taking it to sleep with her, talking to it by the hour together, pulling its tail and twisting its neck so that it growled with rage—­and then, when it growled, she, too, would make strange noises as though sympathising with it.

She returned to me from no sort of sense of duty, but simply because, I think, she did not know where else to go.  She scowled on me and informed me that now that there had been the Revolution everything was different; nevertheless the sight of my sick yellow face moved her as sickness and misfortune always move every Russian, however old and debased he may be.

“You shouldn’t have gone out walking,” she said crossly.  “That man’s been here again?” referring to the Rat, whom she hated.

“If it hadn’t been for him,” I said, “I would have died.”

But she made the flat as cheerful as she could, lighting the stove, putting some yellow flowers into a glass, dusting the Benois water-colour, putting my favourite books beside my bed.

When Henry Bohun came in he was surprised at the brightness of everything.

“Why, how cosy you are!” he cried.

“Ah, ha,” I said, “I told you it wasn’t so bad here.”

He picked up my books, looked at Galleon’s Roads and then Pride and Prejudice.

“It’s the simplest things that last,” he said.  “Galleon’s jolly good, but he’s not simple enough. Tess is the thing, you know, and Tono-Bungay, and The Nigger of the Narcissus...  I usen’t to think so.  I’ve grown older, haven’t I?”