still with the utmost hilarity, and at last they went on their way. Later on, Fyodor Pavlovitch swore that he had gone with them, and perhaps it was so, no one knows for certain, and no one ever knew.
But five or six months later, all the town was talking, with intense and sincere indignation, of Lizaveta’s condition, and trying to find out who was the miscreant who had wronged her.
Then suddenly a terrible rumor was all over the town that this miscreant was no other than Fyodor Pavlovitch.
Who set the rumor going?
Of that drunken band five had left the town and the only one still among us was an elderly and much respected civil councilor, the father of grownup daughters, who could hardly have spread the tale, even if there had been any foundation for it.
But rumor pointed straight at Fyodor Pavlovitch, and persisted in pointing at him.
Of course this was no great grievance to him: he would not have troubled to contradict a set of tradespeople. In those days he was proud, and did not condescend to talk except in his own circle of the officials and nobles, whom he entertained so well.
At the time, Grigory stood up for his master vigorously. He provoked quarrels and altercations in defense of him and succeeded in bringing some people round to his side. “It’s the wench’s own fault,” he asserted, and the culprit was Karp, a dangerous convict, who had escaped from prison and whose name was well known to us, as he had hidden in our town. This conjecture sounded plausible, for it was remembered that Karp had been in the neighborhood just at that time in the autumn, and had robbed three people. But this