time
for talking in the morning. The policemen in the guard-room were sleepy
and not disposed to enter into conversation. Schmidt turned his steps in
the direction of the tobacconist's house for the second time, in sheer
despair. But he found the street door shut and the whole house was dark.
Nevertheless, he pulled the little handle upon which, by the aid of a
flickering match, he discovered a figure of three, corresponding to the
floor occupied by Fischelowitz. Again and again he tugged vigorously at
the brass knob until he could hear the bell tinkling far above. No other
sound followed, however, in the silence of the night, though he strained
his ears for the faintest echo of a distant footfall and the slightest
noise indicating that a window or a door was about to be opened. He
wondered whether Fischelowitz had come home. If he had, Akulina had surely
told him the story of the evening, and he would have been heard of at the
police-station, for it was incredible that he should let the night pass
without making an effort to liberate the Count. Therefore the tobacconist
had in all probability not yet returned. The night was fairly warm, and
the Cossack sat down upon a doorstep, lighted a cigarette and waited. In
spite of long years spent in the midst of German civilisation, it was
still as natural to him to sit down in the open air at night and to watch
the stars, as though he had never changed his own name for the plain
German appellation of Johann Schmidt, nor laid aside the fur cap and the
sheepskin coat of his tribe for the shabby jacket and the rusty black hat
of higher social development.

There was no truth in Akulina's statement that a thunder-storm was
approaching. The stars shone clear and bright, high above the narrow
street, and the solitary man looked up at them, and remembered other days
and a freer life and a broader horizon; days when he had been younger than
he was now, a life full of a healthier labour, a horizon boundless as that
of the little street was limited. He thought, as he often thought when
alone in the night, of his long journeys on horseback, driving great
flocks of bleating sheep over endless steppes and wolds and expanses of
pasture and meadow; he remembered the reddening of the sheep's woolly
coats in the evening sun, the quick change from gold to grey as the sun
went down, the slow transition from twilight to night, the uncertain gait
of his weary beast as the darkness closed in, the so