“That gramophone,” he said, “is my one consolation. When I am tired I turn it on and listen to gipsy songs and to Caruso.” He hummed a tune from an Italian opera. “It’s a beautiful gramophone; you must hear it,” and he fixed a Caruso record on it which sang a song from _Cavalleria Rusticana_. When this was over he talked on for about twenty minutes, of the memories of his youth, of his travels, and many trifling episodes concerning their common relations and acquaintances. Presently he looked at his watch. “My time is really up,” he said, “and now I want to talk to you seriously. You know, Irina, I am alone in the world, and you have got no parents either; so that in a kind of way I look upon myself as your father, and I want you to treat me like a father. I want you to come here whenever you like and to confide in me if ever you have anything that troubles you in any way. And I will always be ready to do anything I can for you; because, you know, little Irina, I am very, very fond of you. And now, I’m afraid my time is up, and I must go back to my work.” He kissed her on both cheeks, and made the sign of the cross on her face. “God bless you,” he said. Irina left the house, and the General rang for his aide-de-camp and settled down to his work. Ten minutes later a loud explosion was heard in the street where the hotel was situated at which Irina had stopped. She had thrown her bomb, but the street was empty at the time, and she had killed no one save herself. A POLICE OFFICER It was the fourth day of the armed rising in Moscow. Early in the morning some of the shops had opened, especially the tobacconists, and there had been a certain amount of movement in the streets; but later on, towards noon, a stillness had again descended on the city. From the centre of the town came the noise of artillery, and in the side streets one heard a ceaseless clicking of firing, though one could not tell whence it came or where it was going on. At half-past six in the evening, when Alexander Petrovitch Pavlov, a police officer, went home to dinner, all the city seemed empty, quiet and deserted, yet at the same time full of an intermittent, unwonted noise. He went down the Square from the Governor’s house where he had had business, past the Hotel Dresden, and stopped to say a few words to the policeman there on duty. The policeman, in reply to some question he had vaguely asked (for Alexander Petrovitch was tired, sick of the whole business and discouraged by what seemed to him to be a tissue of absurdities), said: “They are fools, little fools--nothing will come of it.” He did not pay much attention to this; he was thinking how absurd the whole matter was, and what a nuisance these abnormal upheavings were when they were prolonged.