The house of the Boyar Ramodanofsky was now close at hand, and I looked curiously at the dark and forbidding mass of masonry; it appeared as unapproachable as a fortress, although the gate of the courtyard was open, and there were lights in the windows. Observing my companion upon the street, I saw that he had crossed to the other side, and was keeping well in the shadow. It was evident that I could not reconnoiter outside without being spied upon, so I determined upon a bold course, and entered the courtyard. Finding it vacant, and being now out of sight of the man in the street, I walked cautiously around to the side of the house, observing it narrowly. Von Gaden’s story had awakened the keenest interest in my mind, and I could not avoid the thought of the boyar lying in his blood in that very courtyard, across which his daughter’s feet passed every day, going and returning in the house of her father’s assassin. It was a hideous incongruity. I walked along cautiously, observing the house on the side where I was; the windows were too high from the ground for me to look in, and there was no door in the main building, but there was a low postern in the wing; however, that portion of the house was so quiet that I concluded that it must be the _Terem_, the part allotted to the women, in accordance with the eastern custom, still to a great extent prevalent in Russia. The main building was quiet too, although there were many lights, and some of the windows cast a perfect square of illumination on the wall opposite, so that an occasional shadow of some one passing before the light within was sharply defined on the wall beyond. I soon decided which were the rooms occupied by the boyar himself, and my attention was concentrated upon those. My occupation seemed likely to be fruitless enough, and yet I lingered, held either by fate, or the sense of the propinquity of Zénaïde Ramodanofsky. While I was loitering there, the sound of voices from a window, a little over my head, attracted my notice, and looking about for a way to see into the room, I discovered an irregularity in the masonry, which furnished a precarious foothold; and being an expert climber, I lifted myself up until my eyes were just above the level of the sill. For a moment the light within dazzled me; then becoming accustomed to it, I saw a large square apartment furnished with a luxury far more French than Russian, and at a table sat the Boyar Vladimir Ramodanofsky, Viatscheslav Naryshkin, and a tall man, whom I recognized as one of the unpopular colonels of the Streltsi, although his name was unknown to me. The three worthies were drinking _vodka_, and Viatscheslav was already a little under its influence. The table was across the room from the window, and though I heard the voices plainly enough, they spoke too low for me to catch more than an occasional word; but I gathered that the discourse was political, and was on the question of the possible