“Who was that man?”
“What man?” said Vassili, who sat opposite to us and was pressing the small feet of Maximoff's wife.
“You know—the man who frightened me.”
“Oh, the Scorpion?” laughed Vassili. “That was Donat Prilukoff.”
When we returned to Kieff I told Bozevsky the adventure of our evening at the Strelna, and described the Scorpion to him with as much humor as I could. But Bozevsky did not laugh. My absence had embittered and exasperated him. He no longer sat beside me with an air of protective fraternal affection. He would not speak of literature or poetry any more. He spent entire evenings making mute scenes of jealousy and despair, while dear Aunt Sonia, instinctively feeling the atmosphere around her charged with electricity, dropped many stitches in her knitting and became sour and irritable.
“My child, this must not go on any longer. Either Alexis Bozevsky must be forbidden the house or we ourselves must go away. I cannot understand how Vassili—” Her honest cheeks kindled with indignation. “Enough. I shall speak to him about it myself.”
She did so: and Vassili, with his usual brief comment that we all bored him to death, expressed the hope that wild beasts might devour Bozevsky, and ordered us to pack up and leave for the country at once.
XII
So we all left for the country—to the great delight of Aunt Sonia and the children.