obbed, crouching in her chair. Then slipping from the chair,
knelt catching Nina's knees, her head against her dress.

Nina was aghast, terrified--then in a moment overwhelmed by a surging
flood of love so that she caught Vera to her, caressing her hair,
calling her by her little name, kissing her again and again and again.

"Verotchka--Verotchka--I didn't mean anything. I didn't indeed. I love
you. I love you. You know that I do. I was only angry and wicked. Oh,
I'll never forgive myself. Verotchka--get up--don't kneel to me like
that...!"

She was interrupted by a knock on the outer hall door. To both of them
that sound must have been terribly alarming. Vera said afterwards, that
"at once we realised that it was the knock of some one more frightened
than we were."

In the first place, no one ever knocked, they always rang the rather
rickety electric bell--and then the sound was furtive and hurried, and
even frantic; "as though," said Vera, "some one on the other side of the
door was breathless."

The sisters stood, close together, for quite a long time without moving.
The knocking ceased and the room was doubly silent. Then suddenly it
began again, very rapid and eager, but muffled, almost as though some
one were knocking with a gloved hand.

Vera went then. She paused for a moment in the little hall, for again
there was silence and she fancied that perhaps the intruder had given up
the matter in despair. But, no--there it was again--and this third time
seemed to her, perhaps because she was so close to it, the most urgent
and eager of all. She went to the door and opened it. There was no light
in the passage save the dim reflection from the lamp on the lower floor,
and in the shadow she saw a figure cowering back into the corner behind
the door.

"Who is it?" she asked. The figure pushed past her, slipping into their
own little hall.

"But you can't come in like that," she said, turning round on him.

"Shut the door!" he whispered. "_Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi_.... Shut the
door."

She recognised him then. He was the policeman from the corner of their
street, a man whom they knew well. He had always been a pompous little
man, stout and short of figure, kindly so far as they knew, although
they had heard of him as cruel in the pursuit of his official duties.
They had once talked to him a little and he explained: "I wouldn't hurt
a fly, God knows," he had said, "of myself, but a man likes to do his
work efficien