"And you--you've known her a long time?" "More than a year." "You were intimate with her before her acquaintance with Poluektov?" "You're a cunning fox," thought Ilya, and said quietly: "How can I say, when I didn't know that she lived with the man that's dead." The magistrate drew his lips together and whistled, and began to finger the pile of documents. Ilya looked again at the picture; he felt that his interest in it helped him to keep calm. From somewhere, the clear, gay laugh of a child came to his ear. Then a happy, gentle, woman's voice sang tenderly: "My Annie, my little one, my darling, my dear." "That picture appears to interest you greatly." "Where is Christ supposed to be going?" asked Ilya. The magistrate looked in his face with a weary, disillusioned expression, and said after a pause: "You can see. He's come down to earth to see how men fulfil His commands. He's going over a battle-field--round about are dead men, houses destroyed, fire plundering." "Can't He see that from Heaven?" "H'm, it's rather an allegory, it's represented like that, so as to be plainer, to show how little real life agrees with the teaching of Christ, that is----But come, I must ask you a question or two yet." Ilya turned from the picture and looked in the magistrate's face; a number of little unimportant questions followed, annoying Ilya like autumn flies. He grew tired and felt his attention growing slack and his carefulness wither under the monotonous dull sound. He grew angry with the magistrate, who set these questions, as he well understood, on purpose to weary him. "Can you tell me perhaps," said the magistrate quickly, apparently without any particular intent, "where you were on Thursday between two o'clock and three." "In the ale-house; I was having tea." "Ah! in which inn then? Where?" "In the Plevna." "How is it you are so certain that you were there just at that time?" The magistrate's face looked tense, he leaned over the table and stared into Ilya's face with flaming eyes. Ilya did not reply at once. After a second or two he sighed and said with composure: "Just before I went in, I asked the time of a policeman." The magistrate leaned back again, and began to tap his finger-nails with a blue pencil. "The policeman told me it was twenty minutes to two, or something like that." "He knows you?" "Yes." "Have you no watch?" "No." "Have you ever before asked him the time?" "Yes, it has happened." "The town hall is near, there's a clock." "One forgets to look, and then it was snowing." "Were you long in the Plevna?" "Till the news came of the murder." "Where did you go then?" "I went to look." "Did any one see you there, in front of the shop?" "That policeman saw me, he sent me off--pushed me." "Very good, very important for you," said the magistrate approvingly, then asked at once without looking at Ilya: "Did you ask the time before the murder or after?"