“What, you understand French?”

“A little. I lived for four years after that in a gentleman’s family, and there I picked it up from the children.”

She told him that being left a widow at eighteen she was for some time in Sevastopol as a nurse, and had afterwards lived in various places, and now she travelled about selling the gospel.

“ Mais, mon Dieu , wasn’t it you who had a strange adventure in our town, a very strange adventure?”

She flushed; it turned out that it had been she.

“ Ces vauriens, ces malheureux ,” he began in a voice quivering with indignation; miserable and hateful recollections stirred painfully in his heart. For a minute he seemed to sink into oblivion.