how an acquaintance of his, a retired cornet, Batsov, had eloped with a merchant’s daughter in a staging sledge with bells and three horses, having as a preliminary measure made the parents drunk, and adopted the same precaution as well with the bride, and how, as it afterwards turned out, he was outwitted and within an ace of a thrashing into the bargain. Litvinov felt exceedingly irritated with himself for such inappropriate reminiscences, and then with the recollection of Tatyana, her sudden departure, all that grief and suffering and shame, he felt only too acutely that the affair he was arranging was deadly earnest, and how right he had been when he had told Irina that his honour even left no other course open.... And again at the mere name something of flame turned with sweet ache about his heart and died away again. The tramp of horses’ hoofs sounded behind him.... He moved aside.... Irina overtook him on horseback; beside her rode the stout general. She recognised Litvinov, nodded to him, and lashing her horse with a sidestroke of her whip, she put him into a gallop, and suddenly dashed away at headlong speed. Her dark veil fluttered in the wind.... ‘_Pas si vite! Nom de Dieu! pas si vite!_’ cried the general, and he too galloped after her. XXV The next morning Litvinov had only just come home from seeing the banker, with whom he had had another conversation on the playful instability of our exchange, and the best means of sending money abroad, when the hotel porter handed him a letter. He recognised Irina’s handwriting, and without breaking the seal--a presentiment of evil, Heaven knows why, was astir in him--he went into his room. This was what he read (the letter was in French):