Groholsky and Liza looked at each other. Liza's eyes bulged, her cheeks flushed, and her lips twitched. . . . "Very well," she said. She thought of Mishutka's warm little cot. It would be cruel to exchange that warm little cot for a chilly sofa in the hotel, and she consented. "I shall see him," she said. Bugrov bowed, walked out, and flew down the stairs in his splendour, cleaving the air with his expensive cane. . . . "Home," he said to the cabman. "I am starting at five o'clock to-morrow morning. . . . You will come; if I am asleep, you will wake me. We are driving out of town." II It was a lovely August evening. The sun, set in a golden background lightly flecked with purple, stood above the western horizon on the point of sinking behind the far-away tumuli. In the garden, shadows and half-shadows had vanished, and the air had grown damp, but the golden light was still playing on the tree-tops. . . . It was warm. . . . Rain had just fallen, and made the fresh, transparent fragrant air still fresher. I am not describing the August of Petersburg or Moscow, foggy, tearful, and dark, with its cold, incredibly damp sunsets. God forbid! I am not describing our cruel northern August. I ask the reader to move with me to the Crimea, to one of its shores, not far from Feodosia, the spot where stands the villa of one of our heroes. It is a pretty, neat villa surrounded by flower-beds and clipped bushes. A hundred paces behind it is an orchard in which its inmates walk. . . . Groholsky pays a high rent for that villa, a thousand roubles a year, I believe. . . . The villa is not worth that rent, but it is pretty. . . . Tall, with delicate walls and very delicate parapets, fragile, slender, painted a pale blue colour, hung with curtains, _portières_, draperies, it suggests a charming, fragile Chinese lady. . . .