ng up a wall of her own thoughts.

"Come in for a moment, won't you?" she asked me, rather reluctantly I
thought. But I accepted, climbed the stairs and followed Uncle Ivan's
stubby and self-satisfied progress into the flat.

I heard Vera cry. I hurried after her and found, standing close
together, in the middle of the room Henry Bohun and Nina!

With a little sob of joy and shame too, Nina was locked in Vera's arms.

XV

This is obviously the place for the story, based, of course, on the very
modest and slender account given me by the hero of it, of young Bohun's
knightly adventure. In its inception the whole affair is still
mysterious to me. Looking back from this distance of time I see that he
was engaged on one knightly adventure after another--first Vera, then
Markovitch, lastly Nina. The first I caught at the very beginning, the
second I may be said to have inspired, but to the third I was completely
blind. I was blind, I suppose, because, in the first place, Nina had,
from the beginning, laughed at Bohun, and in the second, she had been
entirely occupied with Lawrence.

Bohun's knight-errantry came upon her with, I am sure, as great a shock
of surprise as it did upon me. And yet, when you come to think of it, it
was the most natural thing. They were the only two of our party who had
any claim to real youth, and they were still so young that they could
believe in one ideal after another as quick as you can catch goldfish in
a bowl of water. Bohun would, of course, have indignantly denied that he
was out to help anybody, but that, nevertheless, was the direction in
which his character led him; and once Russia had stripped from him that
thin coat of self-satisfaction, he had nothing to do but mount his white
charger and enter the tournament.

I've no idea when he first thought of Nina. He did not, of course, like
her at the beginning, and I doubt whether she caused him any real
concern, too, until her flight to Grogoff. That shocked him terribly. He
confessed as much to me. She had always been so happy and easy about
life. Nothing was serious to her. I remember once telling her she ought
to take the war more deeply. I was a bit of a prig about it, I suppose.
At any rate she thought me one.... And then to go off to a fellow like
Grogoff!

He thought of it the more seriously when he saw the agony Vera was in.
She did not ask him to help her, and so he did nothing; but he watched
her efforts, the letters t