is why we are beaten and
despised by the whole world, and yet are finer than them all--so you'd
better not lodge with us any more."

"But of course," said Bohun, disliking more and more this uncomfortable
scene--"of course I shall continue to stay with you. You are my friends,
and one doesn't mind what one's friends do. One's friends are one's
friends."

Suddenly, then, Markovitch jerked himself forward, "just as though,"
Bohun afterwards described it to me, "he had shot himself out of a
catapault."

"Tell me," he said, "is your English friend in love with my wife?"

What Bohun wanted to do then was to run out of the room, down the dark
stairs, and away as fast as his legs would carry him. He had not been in
Russia so long that he had lost his English dislike of scenes, and he
was seriously afraid that Markovitch was, as he put it, "bang off his
head."

But at this critical moment, he remembered, it seems, my injunction to
him, "to be kind to Markovitch--to make a friend of him." That had
always seemed to him before impossible enough, but now, at the very
moment when Markovitch was at his queerest, he was also at his most
pathetic, looking there in the mist and shadows too untidy and dirty and
miserable to be really alarming. Henry then took courage. "That's all
nonsense, Markovitch," he said. "I suppose by 'your English friend' you
mean Lawrence. He thinks the world of your wife, of course, as we all
do, but he's not the fellow to be in love. I don't suppose he's ever
been really in love with a woman in his life. He's a kindly good-hearted
chap, Lawrence, and he wouldn't do harm to a fly."

Markovitch peered into Bohun's face. "What did you come here for, any of
you?" he asked. "What's Russia over-run with foreigners for? We'll clear
the lot of you out, all of you...." Then he broke off, with a pathetic
little gesture, his hand up to his head. "But I don't know what I'm
saying--I don't mean it, really. Only things are so difficult, and they
slip away from one so.

"I love Russia and I love my wife, Mr. Bohun--and they've both left me.
But you aren't interested in that. Why should you be? Only remember when
you're inclined to laugh at me that I'm like a man in a cockle-shell
boat--and it isn't my fault. I was put in it."

"But I'm never inclined to laugh," said Bohun eagerly. "I may be young
and only an Englishman--but I shouldn't wonder if I don't understand
better than you think. You try and see.... And I'l