“That is a lie!” I cried.

He laughed.  “You English,” he said, “are not so unobservant as you seem, but you hate facts.  Vera and your friend Lawrence have been in love with one another since their first meeting, and my dear nephew-in-law Markovitch knows it.”

“That’s impossible,” I cried.  “He—­”

“No,” Semyonov replied, “I was wrong.  He does not know it—­he suspects.  And my nephew-in-law in a state of suspicion is a delightful study.”

By now we were in a narrow street, so dark that we stumbled at every step.  We seemed to be quite alone.

It was I who now caught his arm.  “Semyonov!” I said, and my urgency stopped him so that he stood where he was.  “Leave them alone!  Leave them alone!  They’ve done no harm to you, they can offer you nothing, they are not intelligent enough for you nor amusing enough.  Even if it is true what you say it will pass—­Lawrence will go away.  I will see that he does.  Only leave them alone!  For God’s sake, let them be!”

His face was very close to mine, and, looking at it in the gathering dark, it was as though it were a face of glass behind which other faces passed and repassed.  I cannot hope to give any idea of the strange mingling of regret, malice, pride, pain, scorn, and humour that those eyes showed.  His red lips parted as though he would speak, for a moment he turned away from me and looked down the black tunnel of the street, then he walked forward again.

“You are wrong, my friend,” he said, “if you imagine that there is no amusement for me in the study of my family.  It is my family, you know.  I have none other.  Perhaps it has never occurred to you, Durward, that possibly I am a lonely man.”

As he spoke I heard again the echo of that voice as it vanished into the darkness....  “No one?” and the answer:  “No one."...

“Don’t imagine,” he continued, “that I am asking for your pity.  That indeed would be humorous.  I pity no one, and I despise the men who have it to bestow... but there are situations in life that are intolerable, Ivan Andreievitch, and any man who is a man will see that he escapes from such a thing.  May I not find in the bosom of my family such an escape?” He laughed.

“I know nothing about that,” I began hotly.  “All I know is—­”

But he went on as though he had not heard me.

“Have you ever thought about death since you came away from the Front, Durward?  It used to occupy your mind a good deal while you were there, I remember—­in a foolish, romantic, sentimental way of course.  You’ll forgive my saying that your views of death were those of a second-hand novelist—­all the same I’ll do you the justice of acknowledging that you had studied it at first hand.  You’re not a coward, you know.”

I was struck most vividly with a sense of his uneasiness.  During those other days uneasy was the very last thing that I ever would have said that he was—­even after his catastrophe his grip of his soul did not loosen.  It was just that loosening that I felt now; he had less control of the beasts that dwelt beneath the ground of his house, and he could hear them snarl and whine, and could feel the floor quiver with the echo of their movements.