He was so relieved to find that it was a friend that he did not stop to wonder what Markovitch should be doing hiding in my room. It afterwards struck him that Markovitch looked odd. "Like a kind of conspirator, in old shabby Shuba with the collar turned up. He looked jolly ill and dirty, as though he hadn't slept or washed. He didn't seem a bit surprised at seeing me there, and I think he scarcely realised that it _was_ me. He was thinking of something else so hard that he couldn't take me in." "Oh, Bohun!" he said in a confused way. "Hullo, Nicolai Leontievitch," Bohun said, trying to be unconcerned. "What are you doing here?" "Came to see Ivan Andreievitch," he said. "Wasn't here; I was going to write to him." Bohun then lit a candle and discovered that the place was in a very considerable mess. Some one had been sifting my desk, and papers and letters were lying about the floor. The drawers of my table were open, and one chair was over-turned. Markovitch stood back near the window, looking at Bohun suspiciously. They must have been a curious couple for such a position. There was an awkward pause, and then Bohun, trying to speak easily, said: "Well, it seems that Durward isn't coming. He's out dining somewhere I expect." "Probably," said Markovitch drily. There was another pause, then Markovitch broke out with: "I suppose you think I've been here trying to steal something." "Oh no--oh no--no--" stammered Bohun. "But I have," said Markovitch. "You can look round and see. There it is on every side of you. I've been trying to find a letter." "Oh yes," said Bohun nervously. "Well, that seems to you terrible," went on Markovitch, growing ever fiercer. "Of course it seems to you perfect Englishmen a dreadful thing. But why heed it?... You all do things just as bad, only you are hypocrites." "Oh yes, certainly," said Bohun. "And now," said Markovitch with a snarl. "I'm sure you will not think me a proper person for you to lodge with any longer--and you will be right. I am not a proper person. I have no sense of decency, thank God, and no Russian has any sense of decency, and that is why we are beaten and despised by the whole world, and yet are finer than them all--so you'd better not lodge with us any more." "But of course," said Bohun, disliking more and more this uncomfortable scene--"of course I shall continue to stay with you. You are my friends, and one doesn't mind what one's friends do. One's friends are one's friends." Suddenly, then, Markovitch jerked himself forward, "just as though," Bohun afterwards described it to me, "he had shot himself out of a catapault." "Tell me," he said, "is your English friend in love with my wife?" What Bohun wanted to do then was to run out of the room, down the dark stairs, and away as fast as his legs would carry him. He had not been in Russia so long that he had lost his English dislike of scenes, and he was seriously afraid that Markovitch was, as he put it, "bang off his head."