The dull, stupid, savage-looking face betrayed no sign of intelligence.  He repeated the warning again and again; and at last, at the phrase “that young lady,” the dazed small eyes lit up somewhat, and the man clasped his hands.

“Ein Engel!” he said, apparently to himself.  “Ein Engel—­ein Engel!  Ach Gott—­wie schon—­wie gemuthlich!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Brand said, “that is all very well; but one is not permitted to annoy angels—­to trouble them in the street.  Do you understand that that means punishment—­one must be punished—­if one returns to the house of that young lady?  Do you understand?”

The man regarded him with the small, deep-set eyes again sunk into apathy.

“Ihr Diener, Herr,” said he, submissively.

“You understand you are not to go back to the house of the young lady?”

“Ihr Diener, Herr.”

There was nothing to be got out of him, or into him; so Brand waited until he should get help of Heinrich Reitzei, Lind’s locum tenens.

Reitzei was in the chambers—­at Lind’s table, in fact.  He was a man of about twenty-eight or thirty, slim and dark, with a perfectly pallid face, a small black mustache carefully waxed, and an affectedly courteous smile.  He wore a pince-nez; was fond of slang, to show his familiarity with English; and aimed at an English manner, too.  He seemed bored.  He regarded this man whom Brand introduced to him without surprise, with indifference.

“Hear what this fellow has to say,” Brand said, “will you? and give him distinctly to understand that if he tries again to see Miss Lind, I will break his head for him.  What idiot could have given him Lind’s private address?”

The man was standing near the door, stolid apparently, but with his small eyes keenly watching.  Reitzei said a word or two to him.  Instantly he went—­he almost sprung—­forward; and this movement was so unexpected that the equanimity of the pallid young man received a visible shock, and he hastily drew out a drawer a few inches.  Brand caught sight of the handle of a revolver.

But the man was only eager to tell his story, and presently Reitzei had resumed his air of indifference.  As he proceeded to translate for Brand’s benefit, in interjectional phrases, what this man with the trembling hands and the burning eyes was saying, it was strange to mark the contrast between the two men.

“His name Kirski,” the younger man was saying, as he eyed, with a cool and critical air, the wild look in the other’s face.  “A carver in wood, but cannot work now, for his hands tremble, through hunger and fatigue—­through drink, I should say—­native of a small village in Kiev—­had his share of the Communal land—­but got permission from the Commune to spend part of the year in Kiev itself—­sent back all his taxes duly, and money too, because—­oh, this is it?—­daughter of village Elder—­young, beautiful, of course—­left an orphan, with three brothers—­and their share of the land too much for them.  Ah, this is the story, then, my friend?  Married, too—­young, beautiful, good—­yes, yes, we know all that—­”