So we sat for a quarter of an hour. He looked away — I looked at him — and I noticed that the hair stood up and curled above his forehead in a peculiar way, which, so I have heard from an army doctor who had had a great many wounded pass through his hands, is always a symptom of intense overheating of the brain. . . . The thought struck me again that fate really had laid a heavy hand on this man and that his comrades were right in seeing something “fatal” in him. And yet inwardly I blamed him. “A working-class girl!” I thought, “a fine sort of aristocrat you are yourself!”

“Perhaps you blame me, Ridel,” Tyeglev began suddenly, as though guessing what I was thinking. “I am very . . . unhappy myself. But what to do? What to do?”

He leaned his chin on his hand and began biting the broad flat nails of his short, red fingers, hard as iron.

“What I think, Ilya Stepanitch, is that you ought first to make certain whether your suppositions are correct. . . . Perhaps your lady love is alive and well.” (“Shall I tell him the real explanation of the taps?” flashed through my mind. “No — later.”)

“She has not written ............