She said that word with sudden passion, flinging it at me with a fierce gesture of her hands.  “Do you know what it is to want that something should belong to you, belong entirely to you, and to no one else?  I’ve been too proud to say, but I’ve wanted that terribly all my life.  I haven’t had children, although I prayed for them, and perhaps now it is as well.  But Nina!  She’s known she was mine, and, until now, she’s loved to know it.  But now she’s escaping from me, and she knows that too, and is ashamed.  I think I could bear anything but that sense that she herself has that she’s being wrong—­I hate her to be ashamed.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “it’s time that she went out into the world now and worked.  There are a thousand things that a woman can do.”

“No—­not Nina.  I’ve spoilt her, perhaps; I don’t know.  I always liked to feel that she needed my help.  I didn’t want to make her too self-reliant.  That was wrong of me, and I shall be punished for it.”

“Speak to her,” I said.  “She loves you so much that one word from you to her will be enough.”

“No,” Vera Michailovna said slowly.  “It won’t be enough now.  A year ago, yes.  But now she’s escaping as fast as she can.”

“Perhaps she’s in love with some one,” I suggested.

“No.  I should have seen at once if it had been that.  I would rather it were that.  I think she would come back to me then.  No, I suppose that this had to happen.  I was foolish to think that it would not.  But it leaves one alone—­it—­”

She pulled herself up at that, regarding me with sudden shyness, as though she would forbid me to hint that she had shown the slightest emotion, or made in any way an appeal for pity.

I was silent, then I said: 

“And the third thing, Vera Michailovna?”

“Uncle Alexei is coming back.”  That startled me.  I felt my heart give one frantic leap.

“Alexei Petrovitch!” I cried.  “When?  How soon?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve had a letter.”  She felt in her dress, found the letter and read it through.  “Soon, perhaps.  He’s leaving the Front for good.  He’s disgusted with it all, he says.  He’s going to take up his Petrograd practice again.”

“Will he live with you?”

“No.  God forbid!”

She felt then, perhaps, that her cry had revealed more than she intended, because she smiled and, trying to speak lightly, said: 

“No.  We’re old enemies, my uncle and I. We don’t get on.  He thinks me sentimental, I think him—­but never mind what I think him.  He has a bad effect on my husband.”

“A bad effect?” I repeated.

“Yes.  He irritates him.  He laughs at his inventions, you know.”

I nodded my head.  Yes, with my earlier experience of him I could understand that he would do that.

“He’s a cynical, embittered man,” I said.  “He believes in nothing and in nobody.  And yet he has his fine side—­”