“Are the doors shut?” he asked in an imploring voice.
The Count looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.
“Don't trouble, papasha!” Olenka answered. “They are all shut.… Go back to your room!”
“Is the barn door shut?”
“He's a little queer.… It takes him sometimes,” Urbenin whispered to me as he came in from the lobby. “He's afraid of thieves, and always troubling about the doors, as you see.”
“Nikolai Efimych,” he continued, addressing this strange apparition, “go back to your room and go to bed! Don't trouble, everything is shut up!”
“And are the windows shut?”
Nikolai Efimych hastily looked to see if the windows were properly bolted, and then without taking any notice of us he shuffled off into his own room.
“The poor fellow has these attacks sometimes,” Urbenin began to explain as soon as he had left the room. “He's a good, capable man; he has a family, too—such a misfortune! Almost every summer he is a little out of his mind.…”
I looked at Olenka. She became confused, and hiding her face from us began to put in order again her books that I had disarranged. She was evidently ashamed of her mad father.