Bohun then lit a candle and discovered that the place was in a very considerable mess.  Some one had been sifting my desk, and papers and letters were lying about the floor.  The drawers of my table were open, and one chair was over-turned.  Markovitch stood back near the window, looking at Bohun suspiciously.  They must have been a curious couple for such a position.  There was an awkward pause, and then Bohun, trying to speak easily, said: 

“Well, it seems that Durward isn’t coming.  He’s out dining somewhere I expect.”

“Probably,” said Markovitch drily.

There was another pause, then Markovitch broke out with:  “I suppose you think I’ve been here trying to steal something.”

“Oh no—­oh no—­no—­” stammered Bohun.

“But I have,” said Markovitch.  “You can look round and see.  There it is on every side of you.  I’ve been trying to find a letter.”

“Oh yes,” said Bohun nervously.

“Well, that seems to you terrible,” went on Markovitch, growing ever fiercer.  “Of course it seems to you perfect Englishmen a dreadful thing.  But why heed it?...  You all do things just as bad, only you are hypocrites.”

“Oh yes, certainly,” said Bohun.

“And now,” said Markovitch with a snarl.  “I’m sure you will not think me a proper person for you to lodge with any longer—­and you will be right.  I am not a proper person.  I have no sense of decency, thank God, and no Russian has any sense of decency, and that is why we are beaten and despised by the whole world, and yet are finer than them all—­so you’d better not lodge with us any more.”

“But of course,” said Bohun, disliking more and more this uncomfortable scene—­“of course I shall continue to stay with you.  You are my friends, and one doesn’t mind what one’s friends do.  One’s friends are one’s friends.”

Suddenly, then, Markovitch jerked himself forward, “just as though,” Bohun afterwards described it to me, “he had shot himself out of a catapault.”

“Tell me,” he said, “is your English friend in love with my wife?”

What Bohun wanted to do then was to run out of the room, down the dark stairs, and away as fast as his legs would carry him.  He had not been in Russia so long that he had lost his English dislike of scenes, and he was seriously afraid that Markovitch was, as he put it, “bang off his head.”

But at this critical moment, he remembered, it seems, my injunction to him, “to be kind to Markovitch—­to make a friend of him.”  That had always seemed to him before impossible enough, but now, at the very moment when Markovitch was at his queerest, he was also at his most pathetic, looking there in the mist and shadows too untidy and dirty and miserable to be really alarming.  Henry then took courage.  “That’s all nonsense, Markovitch,” he said.  “I suppose by ‘your English friend’ you mean Lawrence.  He thinks the world of your wife, of course, as we all do, but he’s not the fellow to be in love.  I don’t suppose he’s ever been really in love with a woman in his life.  He’s a kindly good-hearted chap, Lawrence, and he wouldn’t do harm to a fly.”