any one should judge her falsely. A strange girl!'
So mused Nezhdanov; and on the terrace below there was a conversation about him; and he heard it all very clearly.
'I know by instinct,' Kallomyetsev was asserting, 'that that's a red republican. While I was serving on special commission under the governor-general of Moscow, avec Ladislas, I got a quick scent for these gentlemen─the reds─and for dissenters too. I've a wonderfully keen nose, at times.' At this point Kallomyetsev described incidentally how he had once, in the environs of Moscow, caught by the heel an old dissenter, whom he had dropped in upon with the police, and who had all but jumped out of his cottage window. . .. 'And there he had been sitting as quiet as could be, till that minute, the rascal!'
Kallomyetsev forgot to add that the same old man, when shut up in prison, had refused all food, and starved himself to death.
'And your new tutor,' continued the zealous kammerjunker, 'is a red, not a doubt of it! Have you noticed that he never bows first?'
'And why should he bow first?' observed Madame Sipyagin; 'quite the contrary─I like that in him.'
'I am a guest in the house in which he is
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