“Fair exchange is no robbery,” he said, giving Bodlevski the passport of the college assessor’s widow.  “Now that old rascal Pacomius may get to work.”

“What is there to do?” laughed Pacomius; “the passport will do very well.  So let us have a little glass, and then a little game of cards.”

“We are going to know each other better; I like your face, so I hope we shall make friends,” said Kovroff, again shaking hands with Bodlevski.  “Now let us go and have some wine.  You will tell me over our glasses what you want the passport for, and on account of your frankness about the watch, I am well disposed to you.  Lieutenant Sergei Kovroff gives you his word of honor on that.  I also can be magnanimous,” he concluded, and the new friends accompanied by the whole gang went out to the large hall.

There began a scene of revelry that lasted till long after midnight.  Bodlevski, feeling his side pocket to see if the passport was still there, at last left the hall, bewildered, as though under a spell.  He felt a kind of gloomy satisfaction; he was possessed by this satisfaction, by the uncertainty of what Natasha could have thought out, by the question how it would all turn out, and by the conviction that his first crime had already been committed.  All these feelings lay like lead on his heart, while in his ears resounded the wild songs of the Cave.

V

THE KEYS OF THE OLD PRINCESS

It was nine o’clock in the evening.  Natasha lit the night lamp in the bedroom of the old Princess Chechevinski, and went silently into the dressing room to prepare the soothing powders which the doctors had prescribed for her, before going to sleep.

The old princess was still very weak.  Although her periods of unconsciousness had not returned, she was still subject to paroxysms of hysteria.  At times she sank into forgetfulness, then started nervously, sometimes trembling in every limb.  The thought of the blow of her daughter’s flight never left her for a moment.

Natasha had just taken the place of the day nurse.  It was her turn to wait on the patient until midnight.  Silence always reigned in the house of the princess, and now that she was ill the silence was intensified tenfold.  Everyone walked on tiptoe, and spoke in whispers, afraid even of coughing or of clinking a teaspoon on the sideboard.  The doorbells were tied in towels, and the whole street in front of the house was thickly strewn with straw.  At ten the household was already dispersed, and preparing for sleep.  Only the nurse sat silently at the head of the old lady’s bed.

Pouring out half a glass of water, Natasha sprinkled the powder in it, and took from the medicine chest a phial with a yellowish liquid.  It was chloral.  Looking carefully round, she slowly brought the lip of the phial down to the edge of the glass and let ten drops fall into it.  “That will be enough,” she said to herself, and smiled.  Her face, as always, was coldly quiet, and not the slightest shade of any feeling was visible on it at that moment.