"Harm!" I caught him up, "I've no doubt of that; and I've no doubt either that you sincerely deplore the fact, my dear fellow! Have patience--everything will come right."

"I hope so," Tarhov muttered through his teeth, though with a laugh. "But really, my boy, that girl . . . I tell you--it's a new type, you know. You hadn't time to get a good look at her. She's a shy thing!--oo! such a shy thing! and what a will of her own! But that very shyness is what I like in her. It's a sign of independence! I'm simply over head and ears, my boy!"

Tarhov fell to talking of his "charmer," and even read me the beginning of a poem entitled: "My Muse." His emotional outpourings were not quite to my taste. I felt secretly jealous of him. I soon left him.

A few days after I happened to be passing through one of the arcades of the Gostinny Dvor. It was Saturday; there were crowds of people shopping; on all sides, in the midst of the pushing and crushing, the shopmen kept shouting to people to buy. Having bought what I wanted, I was thinking of nothing but getting away from their teasing importunity as soon as possible--when all at once I halted involuntarily: in a fruit shop I caught sight of my comrade's charmer--Musa, Musa Pavlovna! She was standing, profile to me, and