Raisky had written to Paulina Karpovna asking her if he might call the next day about one o’clock. Her answer ran: “CharmÉe, j’attends....” and so on.

He found her in her boudoir in a stifling atmosphere of burning incense, with curtains drawn to produce a mysterious twilight. She wore a white muslin frock with wide lace sleeves, with a yellow dahlia at her breast. Near the divan was placed a sumptuously spread table with covers for two.

Raisky explained that he had come to make a farewell call.

“A farewell call! I won’t hear of such a thing. You are joking, it is a bad joke! No, no! Smile and take back the hated word,” she protested, slipping her arm in his and leading him to the table. “Don’t think of going away. Vive l’amour et la joie.”

She invited him with a coquettish gesture to be seated, and hung a table napkin over his coat, as she might to a child. He devoted an excellent morning appetite to the food before him. She poured out champagne for him and watched him with tender admiration.

After a longish pause when she had filled his glass for the third or fourth time she said: “Well, what have you to say about it?” Then as Raisky looked at her in amazement she continued: “I see, I see! Take off the mask, and have done with concealment.”

“Ah!” sighed Raisky, putting his lips to his glass. They drank to one another’s health.

“Do you remember that night,” she murmured, “the night of love as you called it.”

“How should it fade from my memory,” he whispered darkly. “That night was the decisive hour.”

“I knew it. A mere girl could not hold you ... une nullitÉ, cette pauvre petite fille, qui n’a que sa figure ... shy, inexperienced, devoid of elegance.”

“She could not. I have torn myself free.”

“And have found what you have long been seeking, have you not? What happened in the park to excite you so?”

After a little fencing, Raisky proceeded with his story. “When I thought my happiness was within my grasp, I heard....”

“Tushin was there?” whispered Paulina Karpovna, holding her breath.

He nodded silently, and raised his glass once more.

“Dites tout,” she said with a malicious smile.

“She was walking alone, lost in thought,” he said in a confidential tone, while Paulina Karpovna played with her watch chain, and listened with strained attention. “I was at her heels, determined to have an answer from her. She took one or two steps down the face of the precipice, when someone suddenly came towards her.”

“He?”

“He.”

“What did he do?”

“‘Good evening, Vera Vassilievna,’ he said. ‘How do you do?’ She shuddered.”

“Hypocrisy!”

“Not at all. I hid myself and listened. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘I am spending two days in town,’ he said, ‘to be present at your sister’s fÊte, and I have chosen that day.... Decide, Vera Vassilievna, whether I am to love or not.”

“OÙ le sentiment va-t-il se nicher?” exclaimed Paulina Karpovna. “Even in that clod.”

“‘Ivan Ivanovich!’ pleaded Vera,” continued Raisky. “He interrupted her with ‘Vera Vassilievna, decide whether to-morrow I should ask Tatiana Markovna for your hand, or throw myself into the Volga!’”

“Those were his words?”

“His very words.”

“Mais, il est ridicule. What did she do? She moaned, cried yes and no?”

“She answered, ‘No, Ivan Ivanovich, give me time to consider whether I can respond with the same deep affection that you feel for me. Give me six months, a year, and then I will answer “yes” or “no.”’ Your room is so hot, Paulina Karpovna, could we have a little air?”

Raisky thought he had invented enough, and glanced up at his hostess, who wore an expression of disappointment.

“C’est tout?” she asked.

“Oui,” he said. “In any case Tushin did not abandon hope. On the next day, Marfinka’s birthday, he appeared again to hear her last word. From the precipice he went through the park, and she accompanied him. It seems that next day his hopes revived. Mine are for ever gone.”

“And that is all? People have been spreading God knows what tales about your cousin—and you. They have not even spared that saint Tatiana Markovna with their poisonous tongues. That unendurable Tychkov!”

Raisky pricked up his ears. “They talk about Grandmother?” he asked waveringly.

He remembered the hint Vera had given him of Tatiana Markovna’s love story, and he had heard something from Vassilissa, but what woman has not her romance? They must have dug up some lie or some gossip out of the dust of forty years. He must know what it was in order to stop Tychkov’s mouth.

“What do they say about Grandmother?” he asked in a low, intimate voice. “Ah, c’est degÔutant. No one believes it, and everybody is jeering at Tychkov for having debased himself to interrogate a drink-maddened old beggar-woman. I will not repeat it.”

“If you please,” he whispered tenderly.

“You wish to know?” she whispered, bending towards him. “Then you shall hear everything. This woman, who stands regularly in the porch of the Church of the Ascension, has been saying that Tiet Nikonich loved Tatiana Markovna, and she him.”

“I know that,” he interrupted impatiently. “That is no crime.”

“And she was sought in marriage by the late Count Sergei Ivanovich—”

“I have heard that, too. She did not agree, and the Count married somebody else, but she was forbidden to marry Tiet Nikonich. I have been told all that by Vassilissa. What did the drunken woman say?”

“The Count is said to have surprised a rendezvous between Tatiana Markovna and Tiet Nikonich, and such a rendezvous.

“No, no!” she cried, shaking with laughter. “Tatiana Markovna! Who would believe such a thing?”

Raisky listened seriously, and surmises flitted across his mind.

“The Count gave Tiet Nikonich a box on the ears.”

“That is a lie,” cried Raisky, jumping up. “Tiet Nikonich would not have endured it.”

“A lie naturally—he did not endure it. He seized a garden knife that he found among the flowers, struck the Count to the ground, seized him by the throat, and would have killed him.”

Raisky’s face changed. “Well?” he urged.

“Tatiana Markovna restrained his hand. ‘You are’ she said, ‘a nobleman, not a bandit, your weapon is a sword.’ She succeeded in separating them, and a duel was not possible, for it would have compromised her. The opponents gave their word; the Count to keep silence over what had happened, and Tiet Nikonich not to marry Tatiana Markovna. That is why she remains unmarried. Is it not a shame to spread such calumnies?”

Raisky could no longer contain his agitation, but he said, “You see it is a lie. Who could possibly have seen and heard what passed.”

“The gardener, who was asleep in a corner, is said to have witnessed the whole scene. He was a serf, and fear ensured his silence, but he told his wife, the drunken widow who is now chattering about it. Of course it is nonsense, incredible nonsense. I am the first to cry that it is a lie, a lie. Our respected and saintly Tatiana Markovna!” Paulina Karpovna burst out laughing, but checked herself when she looked at Raisky.

“What is the matter? Allons donc, oubliez tout. Vive la joie! Do not frown. We will send for more wine,” she said, looking at him with her ridiculous, languishing air.

“No, no, I am afraid—” He broke off, fearing to betray himself, and concluded lamely, “It would not agree with me—I am not accustomed to wine.”

He rose from his seat, and his hostess followed his example.

“Good-bye, for ever,” he said.

“No, no,” she cried.

“I must escape from these dangerous places, from your precipices and abysses. Farewell, farewell!”

He picked up his hat, and hurried away. Paulina Karpovna stood as if turned to stone, then rang the bell, and called for her carriage and for her maid to dress her, saying she had calls to pay.

Raisky perceived that there was truth in the drunken woman’s story, and that he held in his hand the key to his aunt’s past. He realised now how she had grown to be the woman she was, and where she had won her strength, her practical wisdom, her knowledge of life and of men’s hearts; he understood why she had won Vera’s confidence, and had been able to calm her niece in spite of her own distress. Perhaps Vera, too, knew the story. While he had been manoeuvring to give another turn to the gossip about Vera’s relations to himself and Tushin, he had lighted by chance on a forgotten but vivid page of his family history, on another drama no less dangerous to those who took part in it, and found that his whole soul was moved by this record of what had happened forty years ago.

“Borushka!” cried Tatiana Markovna in horror, when he entered her room. “What has come to you, my friend? You have been drinking!” She looked keenly at him for a long minute, then turned away when she read in his tell-tale face that he, too, had heard the talk about her past self.