“Come where?”

“To her, to number four!  We must hurry, otherwise—­otherwise I’ll burst with impatience!  Do you know who she is?  You’ll never guess!  Olga Petrovna, Marcus Ivanovitch’s wife—­his own wife—­that’s who it is!  She is the person who bought the matchbox!”

“You—­you—­you are out of your mind!”

“It’s quite simple!  To begin with, she smokes.  Secondly, she was head and ears in love with Klausoff, even after he refused to live in the same house with her, because she was always scolding his head off.  Why, they say she used to beat him because she loved him so much.  And then he positively refused to stay in the same house.  Love turned sour.  ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’  But come along!  Quick, or it will be dark.  Come!”

“I am not yet sufficiently crazy to go and disturb a respectable honorable woman in the middle of the night for a crazy boy!”

“Respectable, honorable!  Do honorable women murder their husbands?  After that you are a rag, and not an examining magistrate!  I never ventured to call you names before, but now you compel me to.  Rag!  Dressing-gown!—­Dear Nicholas Yermolaiyevitch, do come, I beg of you——!”

The magistrate made a deprecating motion with his hand.

“I beg of you!  I ask, not for myself, but in the interests of justice.  I beg you!  I implore you!  Do what I ask you to, just this once!”

Dukovski went down on his knees.

“Nicholas Yermolaiyevitch!  Be kind!  Call me a blackguard, a ne’er-do-weel, if I am mistaken about this woman.  You see what an affair it is.  What a case it is.  A romance!  A woman murdering her own husband for love!  The fame of it will go all over Russia.  They will make you investigator in all important cases.  Understand, O foolish old man!”

The magistrate frowned, and undecidedly stretched his hand toward his cap.

“Oh, the devil take you!” he said.  “Let us go!”

It was dark when the magistrate’s carriage rolled up to the porch of the old country house in which Olga Petrovna had taken refuge with her brother.

“What pigs we are,” said Chubikoff, taking hold of the bell, “to disturb a poor woman like this!”

“It’s all right!  It’s all right!  Don’t get frightened!  We can say that we have broken a spring.”

Chubikoff and Dukovski were met at the threshold by a tall buxom woman of three and twenty, with pitch-black brows and juicy red lips.  It was Olga Petrovna herself, apparently not the least distressed by the recent tragedy.

“Oh, what a pleasant surprise!” she said, smiling broadly.  “You are just in time for supper.  Kuzma Petrovitch is not at home.  He is visiting the priest, and has stayed late.  But we’ll get on without him!  Be seated.  You have come from the examination?”

“Yes.  We broke a spring, you know,” began Chubikoff, entering the sitting room and sinking into an armchair.