I dissuaded her.  If Mrs. Haldin really expected to see Razumov that night it would have been unwise to show herself without him.  The sooner we got hold of the young man and brought him along to calm her mother’s agitation the better.  She assented to my reasoning, and we crossed diagonally the Place de Theatre, bluish grey with its floor of slabs of stone, under the electric light, and the lonely equestrian statue all black in the middle.  In the Rue de Carouge we were in the poorer quarters and approaching the outskirts of the town.  Vacant building plots alternated with high, new houses.  At the corner of a side street the crude light of a whitewashed shop fell into the night, fan-like, through a wide doorway.  One could see from a distance the inner wall with its scantily furnished shelves, and the deal counter painted brown.  That was the house.  Approaching it along the dark stretch of a fence of tarred planks, we saw the narrow pallid face of the cut angle, five single windows high, without a gleam in them, and crowned by the heavy shadow of a jutting roof slope.

“We must inquire in the shop,” Miss Haldin directed me.

A sallow, thinly whiskered man, wearing a dingy white collar and a frayed tie, laid down a newspaper, and, leaning familiarly on both elbows far over the bare counter, answered that the person I was inquiring for was indeed his locataire on the third floor, but that for the moment he was out.

“For the moment,” I repeated, after a glance at Miss Haldin.  “Does this mean that you expect him back at once?”

He was very gentle, with ingratiating eyes and soft lips.  He smiled faintly as though he knew all about everything.  Mr. Razumov, after being absent all day, had returned early in the evening.  He was very surprised about half an hour or a little more since to see him come down again.  Mr. Razumov left his key, and in the course of some words which passed between them had remarked that he was going out because he needed air.

From behind the bare counter he went on smiling at us, his head held between his hands.  Air.  Air.  But whether that meant a long or a short absence it was difficult to say.  The night was very close, certainly.

After a pause, his ingratiating eyes turned to the door, he added—­

“The storm shall drive him in.”

“There’s going to be a storm?” I asked.

“Why, yes!”

As if to confirm his words we heard a very distant, deep rumbling noise.

Consulting Miss Haldin by a glance, I saw her so reluctant to give up her quest that I asked the shopkeeper, in case Mr. Razumov came home within half an hour, to beg him to remain downstairs in the shop.  We would look in again presently.