haughty, not very youthful face. The lieutenant gave her his
card without speaking.

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