“What am I now?” said Zinaida Fyodorovna, in a voice husky with the cold and the damp.  “Where am I to go?  What am I to do?  Gruzin told me to go into a nunnery.  Oh, I would!  I would change my dress, my face, my name, my thoughts . . . everything—­everything, and would hide myself for ever.  But they will not take me into a nunnery.  I am with child.”

“We will go abroad together to-morrow,” I said.

“That’s impossible.  My husband won’t give me a passport.”

“I will take you without a passport.”

The cabman stopped at a wooden house of two storeys, painted a dark colour.  I rang.  Taking from me her small light basket—­the only luggage we had brought with us—­Zinaida Fyodorovna gave a wry smile and said: 

“These are my bijoux.”

But she was so weak that she could not carry these bijoux.

It was a long while before the door was opened.  After the third or fourth ring a light gleamed in the windows, and there was a sound of steps, coughing and whispering; at last the key grated in the lock, and a stout peasant woman with a frightened red face appeared at the door.  Some distance behind her stood a thin little old woman with short grey hair, carrying a candle in her hand.  Zinaida Fyodorovna ran into the passage and flung her arms round the old woman’s neck.

“Nina, I’ve been deceived,” she sobbed loudly.  “I’ve been coarsely, foully deceived!  Nina, Nina!”

I handed the basket to the peasant woman.  The door was closed, but still I heard her sobs and the cry “Nina!”

I got into the cab and told the man to drive slowly to the Nevsky Prospect.  I had to think of a night’s lodging for myself.

Next day towards evening I went to see Zinaida Fyodorovna.  She was terribly changed.  There were no traces of tears on her pale, terribly sunken face, and her expression was different.  I don’t know whether it was that I saw her now in different surroundings, far from luxurious, and that our relations were by now different, or perhaps that intense grief had already set its mark upon her; she did not strike me as so elegant and well dressed as before.  Her figure seemed smaller; there was an abruptness and excessive nervousness about her as though she were in a hurry, and there was not the same softness even in her smile.  I was dressed in an expensive suit which I had bought during the day.  She looked first of all at that suit and at the hat in my hand, then turned an impatient, searching glance upon my face as though studying it.

“Your transformation still seems to me a sort of miracle,” she said.  “Forgive me for looking at you with such curiosity.  You are an extraordinary man, you know.”

I told her again who I was, and why I was living at Orlov’s, and I told her at greater length and in more detail than the day before.  She listened with great attention, and said without letting me finish: