ou took her love away from me."

Semyonov laughed. That laugh seemed to rouse Markovitch to frenzy. He
screamed out. "You have taken everything from me!... You will not leave
me alone! You must be careful. You are in danger, I tell you."

Semyonov sprang up from his chair, and the two men, advancing towards
one another, came into Bohun's vision.

Markovitch was like a madman, his hands raised, his eyes staring from
his head, his body trembling. Semyonov was quiet, motionless, smiling,
standing very close to the other.

"Well, what are you going to do?" he asked.

Markovitch stood for a moment, his hands raised, then his whole body
seemed to collapse. He moved away, muttering something which Bohun could
not hear. With shuffling feet, his head lowered, he went out of the
room. Semyonov returned to his seat.

To Bohun, an innocent youth with very simple and amiable ideas about
life, the whole thing seemed "beastly beyond words."

"I saw a man torture a dog once," he told me. "He didn't do much to it
really. Tied it up to a tree and dug into it with a pen-knife. I went
home and was sick.... Well, I felt sick this time, too."

Nevertheless his own "sickness" was not the principal affair. The point
was the sense of danger that seemed now to tinge with its own faint
stain every article in the room. Bohun's hatred of Semyonov was so
strong that he felt as though he would never be able to speak to him
again; but it was not really of Semyonov that he was thinking. His
thoughts were all centred round Markovitch. You must remember that for a
long time now he had considered himself Markovitch's protector. This
sense of his protection had developed in him an affection for the man
that he would not otherwise have felt. He did not, of course, know of
any of Markovitch's deepest troubles. He could only guess at his
relations with Vera, and he did not understand the passionate importance
that he attached to his Russian idea. But he knew enough to be aware of
his childishness, his simplicity, his _naivete_, and his essential
goodness. "He's an awfully decent sort, really," he used to say in a
kind of apologetic defence. The very fact of Semyonov's strength made
his brutality seem now the more revolting. "Like hitting a fellow half
your size"....

He saw that things in that flat were approaching a climax, and he knew
enough now of Russian impetuosity to realise that climaxes in that
country are, very often, no ordinary affairs. I