away; but checked himself at once, remembering that there was nowhere else he could go, and that he had had another object also in coming.
“Hand it over,” he said roughly.
The old woman fumbled in her pocket for her keys, and disappeared behind the curtain into the other room.
The young man, left standing alone in the middle of the room, listened inquisitively, thinking. He could hear her unlocking the chest of drawers.
“It must be the top drawer,” he reflected.
“So she carries the keys in a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring. … And there’s one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches; that can’t be the key of the chest of drawers … then there must be some other chest or strongbox … that’s worth knowing. Strongboxes always have keys like that … but how degrading it all is.”
The old woman came back.
“Here, sir: as we say ten kopecks the rouble a month, so I must take fifteen kopecks from a rouble and a half for the month in advance. But for the two roubles I lent you before, you owe me now twenty kopecks on the same reckoning in advance. That makes thirty-five kopecks altogether. So I must give you a rouble and fifteen kopecks for the watch. Here it is.”
“What! only a rouble and fifteen kopecks now!”
“Just so.”