ready. The lieutenant
moved slowly after her. She sat down to the table, and, still flushed
and breathing hard, tossed off half a glass of port.

"Listen"--the lieutenant broke the silence--"I hope you are
joking?"

"Not a bit of it," she answered, thrusting a piece of bread into
her mouth.

"H'm! . . . How do you wish me to take all this?"

"As you choose. Sit down and have lunch!"

"But . . . it's dishonest!"

"Perhaps. But don't trouble to give me a sermon; I have my own way
of looking at things."

"Won't you give them back?"

"Of course not! If you were a poor unfortunate man, with nothing
to eat, then it would be a different matter. But--he wants to get
married!"

"It's not my money, you know; it's my cousin's!"

"And what does your cousin want with money? To get fashionable
clothes for his wife? But I really don't care whether your _belle-soeur_
has dresses or not."

The lieutenant had ceased to remember that he was in a strange house
with an unknown lady, and did not trouble himself with decorum. He
strode up and down the room, scowled and nervously fingered his
waistcoat. The fact that the Jewess had lowered herself in his eyes
by her dishonest action, made him feel bolder and more free-and-easy.

"The devil knows what to make of it!" he muttered. "Listen. I shan't
go away from here until I get the IOUs!"

"Ah, so much the better," laughed Susanna. "If you stay here for
good, it will make it livelier for me."

Excited by the struggle, the lieutenant looked at Susanna's laughing,
insolent face, at her munching mouth, at her heaving bosom, and
grew bolder and more audacious. Instead of thinking about the IOU
he began for some reason recalling with a sort of relish his cousin's
stories of the Jewess's romantic adventures, of her free way of
life, and these reminiscences only provoked him to greater audacity.
Impulsively he sat down beside the Jewess and thinking no more of
the IOUs began to eat. . . .

"Will you have vodka or wine?" Susanna asked with a laugh. "So you
will stay till you get the IOUs? Poor fellow! How many days and
nights you will have to spend with me, waiting for those IOUs! Won't
your fiancee have something to say about it?"

II

Five hours had passed. The lieutenant's cousin, Alexey Ivanovitch
Kryukov was walking about the rooms of his country-house in his
dressing-gown and slippers, and looking impatiently out of window.
He was a tall, sturdy man, with a large black bea