“But no! he has humour, and he sees life as it is.  I shall be able always to tell him the truth.  With Nicholas it is always lies....”

She suddenly sprang up and stood before me.

“Now, do you think me noble?” she cried.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Ah! you are incorrigible!  You have drunk Dostoieffsky until you can see nothing but God and the moujik!  But I am alive, Ivan Andreievitch, not a heroine in a book!  Alive, alive, alive!  Not one of your Lisas or Annas or Natashas.  I’m alive enough to shoot Uncle Alexei and poison Nicholas—­but I’m soft too, soft so that I cannot bear to see a rabbit killed... and yet I love Sherry so that I am blind for him and deaf for him and dead for him—­when he is not there.  My love—­the only one of my life—­the first and the last—­”

She flung out her arms: 

“Life!  Now!  Before it is too late!  I want it, I want him, I want happiness!”

She stood thus for a moment, staring out to the sea.  Then her arms dropped, she laughed, fastening her cloak—­

“There’s your nobility, Ivan Andreievitch—­theatrical, all of it.  I know what I am, and I know what I shall do.  Nicholas will live to eighty; I also.  I shall hate him, but I shall he in an agony when he cuts his finger.  I shall never see Sherry again.  Later, he will marry a fresh English girl like an apple....  I, because I am weak, soft putty—­I have made it so.”

She turned away from me, staring desperately at the wall.  When she looked back to me her face was grey.

She smiled.  “What a baby you are!...  But take care of yourself.  Don’t come on Monday if it’s bad weather.  Good-bye.”

She went.

After a bad, sleepless night, and a morning during which I dozed in a nightmareish kind of way, I got up early in the afternoon, had some tea, and about six o’clock started out.

It was a lovely evening; the spring light was in the air, the tufted trees beside the canal were pink against the pale sky, and thin layers of ice, like fragments of jade, broke the soft blue of the water.  How pleasant to feel the cobbles firm beneath one’s feet, to know that the snow was gone for many months, and that light now would flood the streets and squares!  Nevertheless, my foreboding was not raised, and the veils of colour hung from house to house and from street to street could not change the realities of the scene.

I climbed the stairs to the flat and found Vera waiting for me.  She was with Uncle Ivan, who, I found to my disappointment, was coming with us.

We started off.

“We can walk across to the Bourse,” she said.  “It’s such a lovely evening, and we’re a little early.”