e to think so," he said laughing.

"She is still stronger than you...."

"So you are a mystic, Mr.," he said. "Of course, with your romantic
mind that is only natural. You believe, I suppose, that she is with us
here in the room?"

"It cannot be of interest to you," I answered quietly, "what I
believe."

"Yes, it is of interest," he replied in a voice that was friendly and
humorously indulgent, as though he spoke to a child. "I find it
strange--I have found it strange for many weeks now--that I should
think so frequently of you. You are not a man who would naturally be
interesting to me. You are an Englishman and I am not interested in
Englishmen. You are sentimental, you have no idea of life as it is,
you like dull things, dull safe things, you believe always in what you
are told. You have no sense of humour.... You should be of no interest
to me, and yet during these last weeks I have not been able to get rid
of you."

"That is not my fault," I said. "I have not been so anxious for your
company."

"No," he said, speaking rather thoughtfully, as though he were
seriously thinking something out, "you regard me, of course, as a very
bad character. I have no desire to defend myself to you. But the point
is that I have found myself often thinking of you, that I have even
taken trouble sometimes to be with you."

He waited as though he expected me to say something, but I was silent.

"It was perhaps that I saw that Marie Ivanovna cared for you. She gave
you up to the end something that she never gave to me. That I suppose
was tiresome to me."

"You thought you knew her," I said, hoping to hurt him. "You did not
know her at all."

"That may be," he answered. "I certainly did not understand her, but
that was attractive to me. And so, Mr., you thought that _you_
understood her?"

But I did not answer him. My head ached frantically, I was wretchedly
in want of sleep. I jumped to my feet, standing in front of him:

"Leave me alone! Leave me alone!" I cried. "Let us part. I am nothing
to you--you despise me and laugh at me--you have from the first done
so. It was because you laughed at me that she began to laugh. If you
had not been there she might have continued to love me--she was very
inexperienced. And now that she is gone I am of no more importance to
you--let me be! For God's sake, let me be!"

"You are free," he said. "You can return to Mittoevo in an hour's time
when the wagons go."

I did not speak.