to lay me as fast asleep as a bear in winter-time. And in the
meantime, she must have run away with that Penza fellow."

"No, HE is here," I remark.

"Oh, he is, is he? Well, as what has the company registered itself? As
a set of ikon-painters, I should think!"

Again he begins to look anxiously about him.

"Where can she have got to?" he queries.

"To Mass, maybe."

"Of course! Well, I am greatly smitten with her. Yes, my word I am!"

Nevertheless, when Mass comes to an end, and, to the sound of a merry
peal of bells, the well-dressed local Cossacks file out of church, and
distribute themselves in gaudy streams about the hamlet, no Tatiana
makes her appearance.

"Then she IS gone," says Konev ruefully. "But I'll find her yet! I'LL
come up with her!"

That this will happen I do not feel confident. Nor do I desire that it
should.

* * * * *

Five years later I am pacing the courtyard of the Metechski Prison in
Tiflis, and, as I do so, trying to imagine for what particular offence
I have been incarcerated in that place of confinement.

Picturesquely grim without, the institution is, inwardly, peopled with
a set of cheerful, but clumsy, humourists. That is to say, it would
seem as though, "by order of the authorities," the inmates are
presenting a stage spectacle in which they are playing, willingly and
zealously, but with a complete lack of experience, imperfectly
comprehended roles as prisoners, warders, and gendarmes.

For instance, today, when a warder and a gendarme came to my cell to
escort me to exercise, and I said to them, "May I be excused exercise
today? I am not very well, and do not feel like, etcetera, etcetera,"
the gendarme, a tall, handsome man with a red beard, held up to me a
warning finger.

"NO ONE," he said, "has given you permission to feel, or not to feel,
like doing things."

To which the warder, a man as dark as a chimney-sweep, with large blue
"whites" to his eyes, added stutteringly:

"To no one here has permission been given to feel, or not to feel, like
doing things. You hear that?"

So to exercise I went.

In this stone-paved yard the air is as hot as in an oven, for overhead
there lours only a small, flat patch of dull, drab-tinted sky, and on
three sides of the yard rise high grey walls, with, on the fourth, the
entrance-gates, topped by a sort of look-out post.

Over the roof of the building there comes floating the dull roar of the
turbu