“No, he has no fine side,” she interrupted me fiercely.  “None.  He is a bad man.  I’ve known him all my life, and I’m not to be deceived.”

Then in a softer, quieter tone she continued: 

“But tell me, Ivan Andreievitch.  I’ve wanted before to ask you.  You were with him on the Front last year.  We have heard that he had a great love affair there, and that the Sister whom he loved was killed.  Is that true?”

“Yes,” I said, “that is true.”

“Was he very much in love with her?”

“I believe terribly.”

“And it hurt him deeply when she was killed?”

“Desperately deeply.”

“But what kind of woman was she?  What type?  It’s so strange to me.  Uncle Alexei... with his love affairs!”

I looked up, smiling.  “She was your very opposite, Vera Michailovna, in everything.  Like a child—­with no knowledge, no experience, no self-reliance—­nothing.  She was wonderful in her ignorance and bravery.  We all thought her wonderful.”

“And she loved him?”

“Yes—­she loved him.”

“How strange!  Perhaps there is some good in him somewhere.  But to us at any rate he always brings trouble.  This affair may have changed him.  They say he is very different.  Worse perhaps—­”

She broke out then into a cry: 

“I want to get away, Ivan Andreievitch!  To get away, to escape, to leave Russia and everything in it behind me!  To escape!”

It was just then that Sacha knocked on the door.  She came in to say that there was an Englishman in the hall inquiring for the other Englishman who had come yesterday, that he wanted to know when he would be back.

“Perhaps I can help,” I said.  I went out into the hall and there I found Jerry Lawrence.

He stood there in the dusk of the little hall looking as resolute and unconcerned as an Englishman, in a strange and uncertain world, is expected to look.  Not that he ever considered the attitudes fitting to adopt on certain occasions.  He would tell you, if you inquired, that “he couldn’t stand those fellows who looked into every glass they passed.”  His brow wore now a simple and innocent frown like that of a healthy baby presented for the first time with a strange and alarming rattle.  It was only later that I was to arrive at some faint conception of Lawrence’s marvellous acceptance of anything that might happen to turn up.  Vice, cruelty, unsuspected beauty, terror, remorse, hatred, and ignorance—­he accepted them all once they were there in front of him.  He sometimes, as I shall on a later occasion, show, allowed himself a free expression of his views in the company of those whom he could trust, but they were never the views of a suspicious or a disappointed man.  It was not that he had great faith in human nature.  He had, I think, very little.  Nor was he without curiosity—­far from it.  But once a thing was really there he wasted no time