As she went through the rooms with the card, the maid could see on it the name “Alexandr Grigoryevitch Sokolsky.”  A minute later she came back and told the lieutenant that her mistress could not see him, as she was not feeling quite well.  Sokolsky looked at the ceiling and thrust out his lower lip.

“How vexatious!” he said.  “Listen, my dear,” he said eagerly.  “Go and tell Susanna Moiseyevna, that it is very necessary for me to speak to her—­very.  I will only keep her one minute.  Ask her to excuse me.”

The maid shrugged one shoulder and went off languidly to her mistress.

“Very well!” she sighed, returning after a brief interval.  “Please walk in!”

The lieutenant went with her through five or six large, luxuriously furnished rooms and a corridor, and finally found himself in a large and lofty square room, in which from the first step he was impressed by the abundance of flowers and plants and the sweet, almost revoltingly heavy fragrance of jasmine.  Flowers were trained to trellis-work along the walls, screening the windows, hung from the ceiling, and were wreathed over the corners, so that the room was more like a greenhouse than a place to live in.  Tits, canaries, and goldfinches chirruped among the green leaves and fluttered against the window-panes.

“Forgive me for receiving you here,” the lieutenant heard in a mellow feminine voice with a burr on the letter r which was not without charm.  “Yesterday I had a sick headache, and I’m trying to keep still to prevent its coming on again.  What do you want?”

Exactly opposite the entrance, he saw sitting in a big low chair, such as old men use, a woman in an expensive Chinese dressing-gown, with her head wrapped up, leaning back on a pillow.  Nothing could be seen behind the woollen shawl in which she was muffled but a pale, long, pointed, somewhat aquiline nose, and one large dark eye.  Her ample dressing-gown concealed her figure, but judging from her beautiful hand, from her voice, her nose, and her eye, she might be twenty-six or twenty-eight.

“Forgive me for being so persistent . . .” began the lieutenant, clinking his spurs.  “Allow me to introduce myself:  Sokolsky!  I come with a message from my cousin, your neighbour, Alexey Ivanovitch Kryukov, who . . .”

“I know!” interposed Susanna Moiseyevna.  “I know Kryukov.  Sit down; I don’t like anything big standing before me.”

“My cousin charges me to ask you a favour,” the lieutenant went on, clinking his spurs once more and sitting down.  “The fact is, your late father made a purchase of oats from my cousin last winter, and a small sum was left owing.  The payment only becomes due next week, but my cousin begs you most particularly to pay him—­if possible, to-day.”

As the lieutenant talked, he stole side-glances about him.

“Surely I’m not in her bedroom?” he thought.