At the drawing-room door facing me stood my mother, as though rooted to the spot. Behind her, peered several scared female faces. The butler, two footmen, and a page, with his mouth wide open with astonishment, were packed together in the doorway of the hall. In the middle of the dining-room, covered with mire, dishevelled, tattered, and soaking wet--so wet that steam rose all round and water was running in little streams over the floor--knelt, shaking ponderously, as it were, at the last gasp … the very monster I had seen dashing across the yard! And who was this monster? Harlov! I came up on one side, and saw, not his face, but his head, which he was clutching, with both hands in the hair that blinded him with filth. He was breathing heavily, brokenly; something positively rattled in his throat--and in all the bespattered dark mass, the only thing that could be clearly distinguished was the tiny whites of the eyes, straying wildly about. He was awful! The dignitary came into my mind whom he had once crushed for comparing him to a mastodon. Truly, so might have looked some antediluvian creature that had just escaped another more powerful monster, attacking it in the eternal slime of the primeval swamps. ‘Martin Petrovitch!’ my mother cried at last, and she clasped her hands. ‘Is that you? Good God! Merciful heavens!’ ‘I … I …’ we heard a broken voice, which seemed with effort and painfully to dwell on each sound. ‘Alas! It is I!’ ‘But what has happened to you? Mercy upon us!’ ‘Natalia Nikolaev … na … I have … run straight … to you … from home … on foot.…’ ‘Through such mud! But you don’t look like a man. Get up; sit down, anyway.… And you,’ she turned to the maid-servants, ‘run quick for cloths. And haven’t you some dry clothes?’ she asked the butler. The butler gesticulated as though to say, Is it likely for such a size?… ‘But we could get a coverlet,’ he replied, ‘or, there’s a new horse-rug.’ ‘But get up, get up, Martin Petrovitch, sit down,’ repeated my mother. ‘They’ve turned me out, madam,’ Harlov moaned suddenly, and he flung his head back and stretched his hands out before him. ‘They’ve turned me out, Natalia Nikolaevna! My own daughters, out of my own home.…’ My mother sighed and groaned. ‘What are you saying? Turned you out! What wickedness! what wickedness!’ (She crossed herself.) ‘But do get up, Martin Petrovitch, I beg you!’ Two maid-servants came in with cloths and stood still before Harlov. It was clear they did not know how to attack this mountain of filth. ‘They have turned me out, madam, they have turned me out!’ Harlov kept repeating meanwhile. The butler returned with a large woollen coverlet, and he, too, stood still in perplexity. Souvenir’s little head was thrust in at a door and vanished again. ‘Martin Petrovitch! get up! Sit down! and tell me everything properly,’ my mother commanded in a tone of determination.