He was already nervous and troubled, and Nikita’s rudeness made him lose patience. Nevertheless, he was very fond of the fellow, he even spoiled him, and had kept him with him a dozen years. “Fool! fool!” repeated the servant. “Why do you abuse me, sir--and at this time? It isn’t right to abuse me.” Mikhaïloff thought of the place he was going to, and was ashamed of himself. “You would make a saint lose patience, Nikita,” he said, with a softer voice. “Leave that letter addressed to my father lying on the table. Don’t touch it,” he added, blushing. “All right,” said Nikita, weakening under the influence of the wine he had taken, at his own expense, as he said, and blinking his eyes, ready to weep. Then when the captain shouted, on leaving the house, “Good-by, Nikita!” he burst forth in a violent fit of sobbing, and seizing the hand of his master, kissed it, howling all the while, and saying, over and over again, “Good-by, master!” An old sailor’s wife at the door, good woman as she was, could not help taking part in this affecting scene. Rubbing her eyes with her dirty sleeve, she mumbled something about masters who, on their side, have to put up with so much, and went on to relate for the hundredth time to the drunken Nikita how she, poor creature, was left a widow, how her husband had been killed during the first bombardment and his house ruined, for the one she lived in now did not belong to her, etc., etc. After his master was gone, Nikita lighted his pipe, begged the landlord’s daughter to fetch him some brandy, quickly wiped his tears, and ended up by quarrelling with the old woman about a little pail he said she had broken. “Perhaps I shall only be wounded,” the captain thought at nightfall, approaching the bastion at the head of his company. “But where--here or there?” He placed his finger first on his stomach and then on his chest. “If it were only here,” he thought, pointing to the upper part of his thigh, “and if the ball passed round the bone! But if it is a fracture it’s all over.” Mikhaïloff, by following the trenches, reached the casemates safe and sound. In perfect darkness, assisted by an officer of the sappers, he put his men to work; then he sat down in a hole in the shelter of the parapet. They were firing only at intervals; now and again, first on our side and then on _his_, a flash blazed forth, and the fuse of a shell traced a curve of fire on the dark, starlit sky. But the projectiles fell far off, behind or to the right of the quarters in which the captain hid at the bottom of a pit. He ate a piece of cheese, drank a few drops of brandy, lighted a cigarette, and having said his prayers, tried to sleep. IV. Prince Galtzine, Lieutenant-colonel Neferdorf, and Praskoukine--whom nobody had invited, and with whom no one chatted, but who followed them just the same--left the boulevard to go and drink tea at Kalouguine’s quarters. “Finish your story about Vaska Mendel,” said Kalouguine.