roubles. I left the little fete with fifteen kopecks."

Matrena Petrovna was listening to Ermolai, the faithful country
servant who wore always, even here in the city, his habit of fresh
nankeen, his black leather belt, his large blue pantaloons and his
boots glistening like ice, his country costume in his master's city
home. Madame Matrena rose, after lightly stroking the hair of her
step-daughter Natacha, whose eyes followed her to the door,
indifferent apparently to the tender manifestations of her father's
orderly, the soldier-poet, Boris Mourazoff, who had written
beautiful verses on the death of the Moscow students, after having
shot them, in the way of duty, on their barricades.

Ermolai conducted his mistress to the drawing-room and pointed
across to a door that he had left open, which led to the
sitting-room before Natacha's chamber.

"He is there," said Ermolai in a low voice.

Ermolai need have said nothing, for that matter, since Madame
Matrena was aware of a stranger's presence in the sitting-room
by the extraordinary attitude of an individual in a maroon
frock-coat bordered with false astrakhan, such as is on the coats
of all the Russian police agents and makes the secret agents
recognizable at first glance. This policeman was on his knees
in the drawing-room watching what passed in the next room through
the narrow space of light in the hinge-way of the door. In this
manner, or some other, all persons who wished to approach General
Trebassof were kept under observation without their knowing it,
after having been first searched at the lodge, a measure adopted