She sat on the sofa and looked round the room. "Why do I always begin to feel sad at such moments; explain that mystery, you learned person? I've been thinking all my life that I should be goodness knows how pleased at seeing you and recalling everything, and here I somehow don't feel pleased at all, although I do love you.... Ach, heavens! He has my portrait on the wall! Give it here. I remember it! I remember it!" An exquisite miniature in water-colour of Liza at twelve years old had been sent nine years before to Stepan Trofimovitch from Petersburg by the Drozdovs. He had kept it hanging on his wall ever since. "Was I such a pretty child? Can that really have been my face?" She stood up, and with the portrait in her hand looked in the looking-glass. "Make haste, take it!" she cried, giving back the portrait. "Don't hang it up now, afterwards. I don't want to look at it." She sat down on the sofa again. "One life is over and another is begun, then that one is over--a third begins, and so on, endlessly. All the ends are snipped off as it were with scissors. See what stale things I'm telling you. Yet how much truth there is in them!" She looked at me, smiling; she had glanced at me several times already, but in his excitement Stepan Trofimovitch forgot that he had promised to introduce me. "And why have you hung my portrait under those daggers? And why have you got so many daggers and sabres?" He had as a fact hanging on the wall, I don't know why, two crossed daggers and above them a genuine Circassian sabre. As she asked this question she looked so directly at me that I wanted to answer, but hesitated to speak. Stepan Trofimovitch grasped the position at last and introduced me. "I know, I know," she said, "I'm delighted to meet you. Mother has heard a great deal about you, too. Let me introduce you to Mavriky Nikolaevitch too, he's a splendid person. I had formed a funny notion of you already. You're Stepan Trofimovitch's confidant, aren't you?" I turned rather red. "Ach, forgive me, please. I used quite the wrong word: not funny at all, but only..." She was confused and blushed. "Why be ashamed though at your being a splendid person? Well, it's time we were going, Mavriky Nikolaevitch! Stepan Trofimovitch, you must be with us in half an hour. Mercy, what a lot we shall talk! Now I'm your confidante, and about everything, _everything,_ you understand?" Stepan Trofimovitch was alarmed at once. "Oh, Mavriky Nikolaevitch knows everything, don't mind him!" "What does he know?" "Why, what do you mean?" she cried in astonishment. "Bah, why it's true then that they're hiding it! I wouldn't believe it! And they're hiding Dasha, too. Aunt wouldn't let me go in to see Dasha to-day. She says she's got a headache." "But... but how did you find out?" "My goodness, like every one else. That needs no cunning!" "But does every one else...?"