en the dark
weather-stained stone piers were very rusty; and, though fresh tracks of
wheels ran under it, the gate looked as if it had not been opened for
a very long time. But close against the lodge, built of the same grey
stone as the piers (its windows were all boarded up), there was a small
side entrance. The bars of that were rusty too; it stood ajar and looked
as though it had not been closed for a long time. In fact, Razumov,
trying to push it open a little wider, discovered it was immovable.

"Democratic virtue. There are no thieves here, apparently," he muttered
to himself, with displeasure. Before advancing into the grounds he
looked back sourly at an idle working man lounging on a bench in the
clean, broad avenue. The fellow had thrown his feet up; one of his arms
hung over the low back of the public seat; he was taking a day off in
lordly repose, as if everything in sight belonged to him.

"Elector! Eligible! Enlightened!" Razumov muttered to himself. "A brute,
all the same."

Razumov entered the grounds and walked fast up the wide sweep of
the drive, trying to think of nothing--to rest his head, to rest his
emotions too. But arriving at the foot of the terrace before the house
he faltered, affected physically by some invisible interference. The
mysteriousness of his quickened heart-beats startled him. He stopped
short and looked at the brick wall of the terrace, faced with shallow
arches, meagrely clothed by a few unthriving creepers, with an ill-kept
narrow flower-bed along its foot.

"It is here!" he thought, with a sort of awe. "It is here--on this very
spot...."

He was tempted to flight at the mere recollection of his first meeting
with Nathalie Haldin. He confessed it to himself; but he did not move,
and that not because he wished to resist an unworthy weakness, but
because he knew that he had no place to fly to. Moreover, he could
not leave Geneva. He recognized, even without thinking, that it was
impossible. It would have been a fatal admission, an act of moral
suicide. It would have been also physically dangerous. Slowly he
ascended the stairs of the terrace, flanked by two stained greenish
stone urns of funereal aspect.

Across the broad platform, where a few blades of grass sprouted on the
discoloured gravel, the door of the house, with its ground-floor windows
shuttered, faced him, wide open. He believed that his approach had
been noted, because, framed in the doorway, without his tall h