“Folly or weakness,” he repeated bitterly.

“She is a very generous creature,” I observed after a time.  The man admired by Victor Haldin fixed his eyes on the ground.  I turned away and moved off, apparently unnoticed by him.  I nourished no resentment of the moody brusqueness with which he had treated me.  The sentiment I was carrying away from that conversation was that of hopelessness.  Before I had got fairly clear of the raft of chairs and tables he had rejoined me.

“H’m, yes!” I heard him at my elbow again.  “But what do you think?”

I did not look round even.

“I think that you people are under a curse.”

He made no sound.  It was only on the pavement outside the gate that I heard him again.

“I should like to walk with you a little.”

After all, I preferred this enigmatical young man to his celebrated compatriot, the great Peter Ivanovitch.  But I saw no reason for being particularly gracious.

“I am going now to the railway station, by the shortest way from here, to meet a friend from England,” I said, for all answer to his unexpected proposal.  I hoped that something informing could come of it.  As we stood on the curbstone waiting for a tramcar to pass, he remarked gloomily—­

“I like what you said just now.”

“Do you?”

We stepped off the pavement together.

“The great problem,” he went on, “is to understand thoroughly the nature of the curse.”

“That’s not very difficult, I think.”

“I think so too,” he agreed with me, and his readiness, strangely enough, did not make him less enigmatical in the least.

“A curse is an evil spell,” I tried him again.  “And the important, the great problem, is to find the means to break it.”

“Yes.  To find the means.”

That was also an assent, but he seemed to be thinking of something else.  We had crossed diagonally the open space before the theatre, and began to descend a broad, sparely frequented street in the direction of one of the smaller bridges.  He kept on by my side without speaking for a long time.

“You are not thinking of leaving Geneva soon?” I asked.

He was silent for so long that I began to think I had been indiscreet, and should get no answer at all.  Yet on looking at him I almost believed that my question had caused him something in the nature of positive anguish.  I detected it mainly in the clasping of his hands, in which he put a great force stealthily.  Once, however, he had overcome that sort of agonizing hesitation sufficiently to tell me that he had no such intention, he became rather communicative—­at least relatively to the former off-hand curtness of his speeches.  The tone, too, was more amiable.  He informed me that he intended to study and also to write.  He went even so far as to tell me he had been to Stuttgart.  Stuttgart, I was aware, was one of the revolutionary centres.  The directing committee of one of the Russian parties (I can’t tell now which) was located in that town.  It was there that he got into touch with the active work of the revolutionists outside Russia.