“You speak as though your friendship were an honour,” I said hotly.  “It’s a degradation.”

He smiled.  “Now that’s melodrama, straight out of your worst English plays. And how bad they can be!...  But you hadn’t always this vehement hatred.  What’s changed your mind?”

“I don’t know that I have changed my mind,” I answered.  “I think I’ve always disliked you.  But there at the Front and in the Forest you were brave and extraordinarily competent.  You treated Trenchard abominably, of course—­but he rather asked for it in some ways.  Here you’ve been nothing but the meanest skunk and sneak.  You’ve set out deliberately to poison the lives of some of the best-hearted and most helpless people on this earth....  You deserve hanging, if any murderer ever did!”

He looked at me so mildly and with such genuine interest that I was compelled to feel my indignation a whit melodramatic.

“If you are going,” I said more calmly, “for Heaven’s sake go!  It can’t be any pleasure to you, clever and talented as you are, to bait such harmless people as Vera and Nicholas.  You’ve done harm enough.  Leave them, and I forgive you everything.”

“Ah, of course your forgiveness is of the first importance to me,” he said, with ironic gravity.  “But it’s true enough.  You’re going to be bothered with me—­I do seem a worry to you, don’t I?—­for only a few days more.  And how’s it going to end, do you think?  Who’s going to finish me off?  Nicholas or Vera?  Or perhaps our English Byron, Lawrence?  Or even yourself?  Have you your revolver with you?  I shall offer no resistance, I promise you.”

Suddenly he changed.  He came closer to me.  His weary, exhausted eyes gazed straight into mine:  “Ivan Andreievitch, never mind about the rest—­never mind whether you do or don’t hate me, that matters to nobody.  What I tell you is the truth.  I have come to you, as I have always come to you, like the moth to the flame.  Why am I always pursuing you?  Is it for the charm and fascination of your society?  Your wit?  Your beauty?  I won’t flatter you—­no, no, it’s because you alone, of all these fools here, knew her.  You knew her as no one else alive knew her.  She liked you—­God knows why!  At least I do know why—­it was because of her youth and innocence and simplicity, because she didn’t know a wise man from a fool, and trusted all alike....  But you knew her, you knew her.  You remember her and can talk of her.  Ah, how I’ve hungered, hungered, to talk to you about her!  Sometimes I’ve come all this way and then turned back at the door.  How I’ve prayed that it might have been some other who knew her, some real man, not a sentimental, gloomy old woman like yourself, Ivan Andreievitch.  And yet you have your points.  You have in you the things that she saw—­you are honest, you are brave....  You are like a good English clergyman.  But she!...  I should have had some one with wit, with humour, with a sense of life about her.  All the things, all the little things—­the way she walked, her clothes, her smile—­when she was cross!  Ah, she was divine when she was cross!...  Ivan Andreievitch, be kind to me!  Think for a moment less of your morals, less of your principles—­and talk to me of her!  Talk to me of her!”