atred. What's changed your mind?"

"I don't know that I _have_ changed my mind," I answered. "I think I've
always disliked you. But there at the Front and in the Forest you were
brave and extraordinarily competent. You treated Trenchard abominably,
of course--but he rather asked for it in some ways. Here you've been
nothing but the meanest skunk and sneak. You've set out deliberately to
poison the lives of some of the best-hearted and most helpless people on
this earth.... You deserve hanging, if any murderer ever did!"

He looked at me so mildly and with such genuine interest that I was
compelled to feel my indignation a whit melodramatic.

"If you are going," I said more calmly, "for Heaven's sake go! It
_can't_ be any pleasure to you, clever and talented as you are, to bait
such harmless people as Vera and Nicholas. You've done harm enough.
Leave them, and I forgive you everything."

"Ah, of course your forgiveness is of the first importance to me," he
said, with ironic gravity. "But it's true enough. You're going to be
bothered with me--I _do_ seem a worry to you, don't I?--for only a few
days more. And how's it going to end, do you think? Who's going to
finish me off? Nicholas or Vera? Or perhaps our English Byron, Lawrence?
Or even yourself? Have you your revolver with you? I shall offer no
resistance, I promise you."

Suddenly he changed. He came closer to me. His weary, exhausted eyes
gazed straight into mine: "Ivan Andreievitch, never mind about the
rest--never mind whether you do or don't hate me, that matters to
nobody. What I tell you is the truth. I have come to you, as I have
always come to you, like the moth to the flame. Why am I always pursuing
you? Is it for the charm and fascination of your society? Your wit? Your
beauty? I won't flatter you--no, no, it's because you alone, of all
these fools here, knew her. You knew her as no one else alive knew her.
She liked you--God knows why! At least I do know why--it was because of
her youth and innocence and simplicity, because she didn't know a wise
man from a fool, and trusted all alike.... But you knew her, you knew
her. You remember her and can talk of her. Ah, how I've hungered,
hungered, to talk to you about her! Sometimes I've come all this way and
then turned back at the door. How I've prayed that it might have been
some other who knew her, some real man, not a sentimental, gloomy old
woman like yourself, Ivan Andreievitch. And yet you have your po