In fact, Peter had created in his own mind a vision of Vashka that went beyond the time when he would have killed Kirsakoff. It was sort of an unformed, inchoate dream which consisted of nothing more tenuous than mental flits into the future in which he always saw Vashka. As she knew the secret of his coming back to Chita, she would also hold his secret about who had killed Kirsakoff. She would always understand, as she understood now. Only a Russian, a Russian girl who knew as Vashka knew the terrors of the Valley of Despair, fitted his idea of a confidant in this affair. Katerin, as “Vashka,” had done her work well! Peter was now sure that Fate had a hand in everything which had brought him back to the place of his boyhood. The whole thing had come about with an inevitableness which revealed a divinely directed plan. If some force had shaped events for him with such unerring accuracy, he saw no reason why the final result should not be brought about with the same ease with which he had come thus far on the way to his revenge. He had a feeling that the task he had set himself was now accomplished—the finding of Kirsakoff. His mind was at rest, and he felt the need of relaxation from the strain of wavering hopes and doubts. Also, he suddenly felt hungry with that voracious appetite which comes to people who pass the crisis of a severe illness and know without reservation that they are on the way to complete recovery. The fiddler he had heard on the floor above before going to talk with Katerin and her father, had now descended to the hotel dining room, and was playing merrily. There were other instruments, too—an orchestra. The music was a novelty for the hotel. It lifted Peter’s spirits, and dispelled the gloom of the place. For the first time since he had arrived in Chita Peter wished to move about among other people. He washed at the little sink, and combed his hair. Then he went down the hall to the dining room. There were but a few people in the place—young men in Cossack uniform, with flashily dressed women, sitting by twos at the little tables along the wall under the frosty windows. The gloominess of the room was apparent even under the lights and the music, but it was the merriest scene Peter had seen in the city. There were four musicians on a raised platform at the far end of the room close to the red-painted buffet-bar with the smashed mirrors. And the quartet was clad in poor and ill-fitting gray suits—the men were German prisoners of war.