Lukyánitch remained silent for a space.
"Very well,"—he said at last.—"Pray, enter...."
And bending down, he stepped across the threshold of the wicket-gate. I followed him. After traversing a tiny courtyard, we ascended the tottering steps of the porch. The old man gave the door a push; there was no lock on it: a cord with a knot stuck out through the key-hole.... We entered the house. It consisted in all of five or six low-ceiled rooms, and, so far as I could make out in the faint light, which streamed sparsely through the rifts in the shutters, the furniture in these rooms was extremely plain and decrepit. In one of them (namely, in the one which opened on the garden) stood a small, antiquated piano.... I raised its warped lid and struck the keys: a shrill, hissing sound rang out and died feebly away, as though complaining of my audacity. It was impossible to discern from anything that people had recently left the house; it had a dead and stifling sort of smell—the odour of an uninhabited dwelling; here and there, indeed, a discarded paper gave one to understand, by its whiteness, that it had been dropped there recently. I picked up one such bit of paper; it proved to be a scrap of a letter; on one side in a dashing feminine handwriting were scrawled the words "se taire?" on the other I made out the word "bonheur."... On a small round table near the window stood a nosegay of half-faded flowers in a glass, and a green, rumpled ribbon was lying there also .... I took that ribbon as a souvenir.—Lukyánitch opened a narrow door, pasted over with wall-paper.
"Here,"—said he, extending his hand:—"this here is the bedroom, and yonder, beyond it, is the room for the maids, and there are no other chambers...."
We returned by way of the corridor.—"And what room is that yonder?"—I asked, pointing at a broad, white door with a lock.
"That?"—Lukyánitch answered me, in a dull voice.—"That 's nothing."
"How so?"
"Because.... 'T is a store-room..." And he started to go into the anteroom.
"A store-room? Cannot I look at it?"...