got.... But we must get her back, Ivan Andreievitch. She _must_
come back--"

Nicholas came in and then Semyonov and then Bohun.

Bohun, drawing me aside, whispered to me: "Can I come and see you? I
must ask your advice--"

"To-morrow evening," I told him, and left.

Next day I was ill again. I had I suppose done too much the day before.
I was in bed alone all day. My old woman had suddenly returned without a
word of explanation or excuse. She had not, I am sure, even got so far
as the Moscow Province. I doubt whether she had even left Petrograd. I
asked her no questions. I could tell of course that she had been
drinking. She was a funny old creature, wrinkled and yellow and hideous,
very little different in any way from a native in the wilds of Central
Africa. The savage in her liked gay colours and trinkets, and she would
stick flowers in her hair and wear a tinkling necklace of bright red and
blue beads. She had a mangy dog, hairless in places and rheumy at the
eyes, who was all her passion, and this creature she would adore, taking
it to sleep with her, talking to it by the hour together, pulling its
tail and twisting its neck so that it growled with rage--and then, when
it growled, she, too, would make strange noises as though sympathising
with it.

She returned to me from no sort of sense of duty, but simply because, I
think, she did not know where else to go. She scowled on me and informed
me that now that there had been the Revolution everything was different;
nevertheless the sight of my sick yellow face moved her as sickness and
misfortune always move every Russian, however old and debased he may be.

"You shouldn't have gone out walking," she said crossly. "That man's
been here again?" referring to the Rat, whom she hated.

"If it hadn't been for him," I said, "I would have died."

But she made the flat as cheerful as she could, lighting the stove,
putting some yellow flowers into a glass, dusting the Benois
water-colour, putting my favourite books beside my bed.

When Henry Bohun came in he was surprised at the brightness of
everything.

"Why, how cosy you are!" he cried.

"Ah, ha," I said, "I told you it wasn't so bad here."

He picked up my books, looked at Galleon's _Roads_ and then _Pride and
Prejudice_.

"It's the simplest things that last," he said. "Galleon's jolly good,
but he's not simple enough. _Tess_ is the thing, you know, and
_Tono-Bungay,_ and _The Nigger of the Narcissus_... I