“Your excellency, I will not stir from this spot until you grant me mercy,” said Tchitchikoff, not releasing the prince’s boot, but pressing it close to his breast, and making his way across the floor, coat of Navarino smoke and flame included, in company with the boot.

“Leave, I tell you!” repeated the prince, with the same inexplicable sensation of disgust which a man experiences at the sight of some repulsive insect which he cannot bring himself to crush under foot. He shook himself so violently, that Tchitchikoff felt the shock of the prince’s foot upon his nose, his lips, and his rounded chin. But he did not relax his hold upon the boot, he even clasped the leg in his embrace with renewed energy. Two stalwart gendarmes dragged him away by main force, bound his arms, and then led him through all the apartments. He was pale and worn, and in that condition of nervous terror in which a man finds himself when he sees before him black, inevitable death, that bugbear which is so repellent to our natures.

At the very door opening upon the staircase Murazoff met him. A ray of hope suddenly flashed through his mind. In an instant, by the exercise of supernatural strength, he had torn himself from the hands of the two gendarmes, and had flung himself at the feet of the astounded old man.

“My friend, Pavel Ivanovitch, what is the matter with you?” exclaimed Murazoff.

“Save me! They are leading me to prison—to my death.” However, the gendarmes seized him and carried him off, without allowing him to complete his sentence.

A damp and musty attic filled with the odour of the boots and foot-bandages of the soldiers of the garrison, an unpainted table, two miserable chairs, a window with an iron grating, a worthless stove, through whose cracks the smoke emerged, but which gave out no heat, such were the quarters where Tchitchikoff, in his fine new coat of Navarino smoke and flame, was lodged, before he had begun to taste the sweets of life and to attract the attention of his contemporaries. He had not been allowed to make any preparations, or even to take the most indispensable articles with him. His dressing-case, where his money was kept, his papers, his deeds of sale respecting the dead souls—everything now was in the hands of the authorities. He flung himself on the floor: hopeless sorrow, like a carnivorous worm, coiled itself about his heart. With ever-increasing swiftness did it begin to devour this heart, which was wholly unprotected. One day more, only one day more of such anguish, and Tchitchikoff would have utterly ceased to exist on this earth! But some one’s all-saving hand had not been idle in Tchitchikoff’s affairs. An hour later the door of his prison was flung open. Old Murazoff entered.

If some person had poured fresh water from a spring into the parched throat of a weary and fainting traveller tortured with thirst, and covered with the dust and dirt of the road, he would not have strengthened and refreshed the wayfarer to such an extent as this visit revivified our hero.

“My saviour!” he exclaimed, suddenly springing from the floor, upon which he had thrown himself in his outburst of grief; and grasping Murazoff’s hand, he kissed it quickly, and pressed it to his bosom. “May God reward you for having thus visited an unhappy wretch!”

He burst into tears.

The old man gazed at him with a look of pain and compassion, and said, “Ah, Pavel, Pavel Ivanovitch! Pavel Ivanovitch, what have you done?”

“What was there for me to do? That accursed lack of judgment as to measure overtook me, and I had not sense enough to pause in time. Satan, the accursed, beguiled me, led me beyond the bounds of reason and of human calculations. I have sinned, I have sinned! But how could they behave in that manner? To throw a nobleman, a nobleman, into prison without a hearing, without even an investigation! A nobleman, Afanasiy Vasilievitch! And why did not they allow me time to go to my quarters, to arrange my affairs? Now everything that belongs to me is left without anyone to take care of it. My dressing- case, Afanasiy Vasilievitch! my dressing-case! It contains my entire property. I won it by the sweat of