themselves, their hopes, their
disappointments, their joys, their tragedies, to the first strangers
whom they met. It seemed quite natural to them that Trenchard, puffing
his rebellious pipe, should talk to them about Glebeshire, Polchester,
Rafiel, Millie and Katherine Trenchard.

"I'd like you to meet Katherine, Anna Petrovna," he would say. "You
would find her delightful. She's married now to a young man she ran
away with, which surprised every one--her running away, I mean,
because she was always considered such a serious character."

"I forget whether you've seen my children, 'Mr.'" Anna Petrovna would
reply. "I must show you their photograph."

And she would produce the large and hideous picture.

He was the same as in those first days, and yet how immensely not the
same. He bore himself now with a chivalrous tact towards Marie
Ivanovna that was beyond all praise. He always cherished in his heart
his memory of their little conversation in the orchard. "How I wish,"
he told me, "that I had made that conversation longer. It was so very
short and I might so easily have lengthened it. There were so many
things afterwards that I might have said--and she never gave me
another chance."

She never did--she kept him from her. Kind to him, perhaps, but never
allowing him another moment's intimacy. He had almost the air, it
seemed to me, of patiently waiting for the moment when she should need
him, the air too of a man who was sure, in his heart, that that moment
would come.

And the other thing that stiffened him was his hatred for Semyonov.
Hatred may seem too fierce a word for the emotion of any one as mild
and gentle as Trenchard--and yet hatred at this time it was. He seemed
no longer afraid of Semyonov and there was something about him now
which surprised the other man. Through all those first days at
Mittoevo, when we seemed for a moment almost to have slipped out of the
war and to be leading the smaller more quarrelsome life of earlier
days, Trenchard was occupied with only one question--"What was he
feeling about Semyonov?"--"I felt as though I could stand anything if
only she didn't love him. Since that awful night of the Retreat I had
resigned myself to losing her; any one should marry her who would make
her happy--but he--never! But it was the indecision that I could not
bear. I didn't know--I couldn't tell, what she felt."

The indecision was not to last much longer. One evening, when we had
been at Mi