I naturally thought that this was another trap and answered wrathfully: “You are a villain! You are all villains! What do you want with me? What have I done to deserve torture and starvation? If I fall into your hands it will be only when I am dead. I am going to drink this poison and let you gloat over my corpse.” The man got excited. He ran out into the yard, raised an alarm, and dragging several people with him, shouted that I had threatened to take poison. A large crowd collected round the house, and he forced the window of my room from the outside and jumped in. Seizing the glass of essence, he threw it out of the window, cursing Anna Petrovna and her house. He made every effort to calm me, expressing his admiration for my courage and virtue. His professions of sincerity and friendship were so convincing that I yielded to his invitation to go with him to the home of his parents. My saviour, who was a handsome young man of about twenty-four, was Yakov Buk. He was a man of education, having studied at a high school for some time. His father was a butcher. I was well received by his family, fed, dressed and allowed to rest. They were kind and hospitable people. Yakov, or Yasha, as he was called by his intimates, took especial care of me. He loved me, and it was not long before he declared that he could not live without me. I was also attracted towards him. He knew of my previous marriage and proposed that we should live together by civil agreement, without the sanction of the Church, a very common mode of marriage in Russia of late years, because of the difficulty of obtaining a divorce. I consented to his proposal, on condition that he told me the reason for his living in a small barn in the backyard, apart from the family. He agreed. “When I was twenty,” he began, “my father was engaged in the business of supplying meat to several army regiments. He was a partner in a firm, and was assisted by my brothers and myself. Considering me the most industrious and reliable of his sons, he entrusted me once with ten thousand roubles (about £1,055 11_s._) to go to buy cattle. Most of the money did not belong to him. “On the train I was drawn into a game of cards, deliberately got up by a gang of rascals for the purpose of fleecing innocent passengers like myself. I lost all my money and my clothes to boot. Dressed in rags, with two roubles, presented to me by the gamblers, in my pocket, I alighted at the Chinese frontier in a suicidal state of mind. There I became acquainted, at an inn, with some Chinese brigands who were members of a band operating in the neighbourhood. One of them was the chief of the band.