ou believe in the good of no
one. If there's really a Revolution coming, which I still doubt, it may
lead to the noblest liberation."

"Oh, you're an ass!" he interrupted quietly. "Nobility and the human
race! I tell you, Ivan Andreievitch of the noble character, that the
human race is rotten; that it is composed of selfishness, vice, and
meanness; that it is hypocritical beyond the bounds of hypocrisy, and
that of all mean cowardly nations on this earth the Russian nation is
the meanest and most cowardly!... That fine talk of ours that you
English slobber over!--a mere excuse for idleness, and you'll know it
before another year is through. I despise mankind with a contempt that
every day's fresh experience only the more justifies. Only once have I
found some one who had a great soul, and she, too, if I had secured
her, might have disappointed me.... No, my time is coming. I shall see
at last my fellowmen in their true colours, and I shall even perhaps
help them to display them. My worthy Markovitch, for example--"

"What about Markovitch?" I asked sharply.

He got up, smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder.

"He shall be driven by ghosts," he answered, and turned off to the
stairs.

He looked back for a moment. "The funny thing is, I like you, Durward,"
he said.

X

I remember very little of my return to my island that night. The world
was horribly dark and cold, the red moon had gone, and a machine-gun
pursued me all the way home like a barking dog. I crossed the bridge
frankly with nerves so harassed, with so many private anxieties and so
much public apprehension, with so overpowering a suspicion that every
shadow held a rifle that my heart leapt in my breast, and I was suddenly
sick with fear when some one stepped across the road and put his hand on
my arm. You see I have nothing much to boast about myself. My relief was
only slightly modified when I saw that it was the Rat. The Rat had
changed! He stood, as though on purpose under the very faint grey light
of the lamp at the end of the bridge, and seen thus, he did in truth
seem like an apparition. He was excited of course, but there was more in
his face than that. The real truth about him was, that he was filled
with some determination, some purpose. He was like a child who is
playing at being a burglar, his face had exactly that absorption, that
obsessing pre-occupation.

"I've been waiting for you, Barin," he said in his hoarse musical voice.