“In August we shall have the money to do up the lodge in the garden,” said Vlassitch.

“For some reason when it thunders I think of that grandfather,” Zina went on.  “And in this dining-room somebody was flogged to death.”

“That’s an actual fact,” said Vlassitch, and he looked with wide-open eyes at Pyotr Mihalitch.  “Sometime in the forties this place was let to a Frenchman called Olivier.  The portrait of his daughter is lying in an attic now—­a very pretty girl.  This Olivier, so my father told me, despised Russians for their ignorance and treated them with cruel derision.  Thus, for instance, he insisted on the priest walking without his hat for half a mile round his house, and on the church bells being rung when the Olivier family drove through the village.  The serfs and altogether the humble of this world, of course, he treated with even less ceremony.  Once there came along this road one of the simple-hearted sons of wandering Russia, somewhat after the style of Gogol’s divinity student, Homa Brut.  He asked for a night’s lodging, pleased the bailiffs, and was given a job at the office of the estate.  There are many variations of the story.  Some say the divinity student stirred up the peasants, others that Olivier’ s daughter fell in love with him.  I don’t know which is true, only one fine evening Olivier called him in here and cross-examined him, then ordered him to be beaten.  Do you know, he sat here at this table drinking claret while the stable-boys beat the man.  He must have tried to wring something out of him.  Towards morning the divinity student died of the torture and his body was hidden.  They say it was thrown into Koltovitch’s pond.  There was an inquiry, but the Frenchman paid some thousands to some one in authority and went away to Alsace.  His lease was up just then, and so the matter ended.”

“What scoundrels!” said Zina, shuddering.

“My father remembered Olivier and his daughter well.  He used to say she was remarkably beautiful and eccentric.  I imagine the divinity student had done both—­stirred up the peasants and won the daughter’s heart.  Perhaps he wasn’t a divinity student at all, but some one travelling incognito.”

Zina grew thoughtful; the story of the divinity student and the beautiful French girl had evidently carried her imagination far away.  It seemed to Pyotr Mihalitch that she had not changed in the least during the last week, except that she was a little paler.  She looked calm and just as usual, as though she had come with her brother to visit Vlassitch.  But Pyotr Mihalitch felt that some change had taken place in himself.  Before, when she was living at home, he could have spoken to her about anything, and now he did not feel equal to asking her the simple question, “How do you like being here?” The question seemed awkward and unnecessary.  Probably the same change had taken place in her.  She was in no haste to turn the conversation to her mother, to her home, to her relations with Vlassitch; she did not defend herself, she did not say that free unions are better than marriages in the church; she was not agitated, and calmly brooded over the story of Olivier. . . .  And why had they suddenly begun talking of Olivier?