ed cushions. She was desperately lonely. She
hated the woman of the house, who tried, I have no doubt, to be kind to
her, and after the first week she was left to herself.

One night, long after she had gone to bed there was a row downstairs,
one of the scenes common enough between Semyonov and his women.
Terrified, she went to the head of the stairs and heard the smash of
falling glass and her uncle's voice raised in a scream of rage and
vituperation. A great naked woman in a gold frame swung and leered at
her in the lighted passage. She fled back to her dark room and lay, for
the rest of that night, trembling and quivering with her head beneath
the bed-clothes.

From that moment she feared her uncle as much as she hated him. Long
afterwards came his influence over Nicholas. No one had so much
influence over Nicholas as he. Nicholas himself admitted it. He was
alternately charmed and frightened, beguiled and disgusted, attracted
and repulsed. Before the war Semyonov had, for a time, seen a good deal
of them, and Nicholas steadily degenerated. Then Semyonov was bored with
it all and went off after other game more worthy of his doughty spear.
Then came the war, and Vera devoutedly hoped that her dear uncle would
meet his death at the hands of some patriotic Austrian. He did indeed
for a time disappear from their lives, and it seemed that he might never
come back again. Then on that fateful Christmas Day he did return, and
Vera's worst fears were realised. She hated him all the more because of
her impotence. She could do nothing against him at all. She was never
very subtle in her dealings with people, and her own natural honesty
made her often stupid about men's motives. But the thing for which she
feared her uncle most was his, as it seemed to her, supernatural
penetration into the thoughts of others.

She of course greatly exaggerated his gifts in that direction simply
because they were in no way her gifts, and he, equally of course,
discovered very early in their acquaintance that this was the way to
impress her. He played tricks with her exactly as a conjurer produces a
rabbit out of a hat....

When he announced his intention of coming to live in the flat she was
literally paralyzed with fright. Had it been any one else she would have
fought, but in her uncle's drawing gradually nearer and nearer to the
centre of all their lives, coming as it seemed to her so silently and
mysteriously, without obvious motive, and