pect demanded it, but let her "come round" and
round we came too.

Her treatment of Semyonov was strange. She was quite fearless,
laughing at his temper, his sarcasm, rebuking his selfishness and bad
manners, avoiding his coarse and unhesitating love-making, and above
all, trusting him in the oddest way as though, in spite of his faults,
she placed all her reliance on him and knew that he would not fail
her. Nothing annoyed him more than her behaviour to Trenchard. It
would, of course, be absurd to say that he was jealous of Trenchard;
he despised the man too deeply and was, himself, too sure of his lady
to know jealousy; but he was irritated by the attention paid to him,
irritated even by the attention he himself paid to him.

"Wherever I go there's that man," he said once to me. "Why doesn't he
go back to his own country?"

"I suppose," I would answer hotly, "he has other things to do than to
consider your individual wishes, Alexei Petrovitch."

Then he would laugh: "Well, well, Ivan Andreievitch, you
sentimentalists all hang together."

"Why can't you leave him alone?" I remember that I continued.

"Because he doesn't leave me alone," he answered shortly.

It was, of course, Marie Ivanovna who brought them together. She could
not see, or rather she _would_ not see, that friendship between two
such men was an impossibility. For herself she liked Trenchard better
than she had ever done. She had now no responsibility towards him; we
were all fond of him, pleased ourselves by saying that "he was more
Russian than English." The Sisters mended his clothes, cared for his
stomach, and listened with pleased gravity to his innocent chatter.
Marie Ivanovna was now really proud of him. There were great stories
of the courage and enterprise he had shown during the night when he
had been with Nikitin. Nikitin, in his lofty romantic fashion, spoke
of him as though he had been the hero of the Russian army. Trenchard
was, of course, quite unspoiled by this praise and popularity. He
remained for me at least very much the same innocent, clumsy,
pathetic, and frequently irritating figure that he had been at the
beginning. I will honestly confess that I was often heartily tired of
his Glebeshire stories, tired too of a certain childish obstinacy with
which he clung to his generally crude and half-baked opinions.

But then I do not care to be contradicted by people of whom,
intellectually, I have a low estimation; it is one of my