riage waiting a short distance, about
twenty-five paces, to one side of the front door. When Liza jumped out,
she ran straight to this carriage; the door was flung open and shut
again; Liza called to Mavriky Nikolaevitch, "Spare me," and the carriage
drove off at full speed to Skvoreshniki. To our hurried questions
whether it was by arrangement? Who was in the carriage? Pyotr
Stepanovitch answered that he knew nothing about it; no doubt it had
been arranged, but that he did not see Stavrogin himself; possibly the
old butler, Alexey Yegorytch, might have been in the carriage. To the
question "How did he come to be there, and how did he know for a fact
that she had driven to Skvoreshniki?" he answered that he happened to be
passing and, at seeing Liza, he had run up to the carriage (and yet he
could not make out who was in it, an inquisitive man like him!) and
that Mavriky Nikolaevitch, far from setting off in pursuit, had not
even tried to stop Liza, and had even laid a restraining hand on the
marshal's wife, who was shouting at the top of her voice: "She is going
to Stavrogin, to Stavrogin." At this point I lost patience, and cried
furiously to Pyotr Stepanovitch:

"It's all your doing, you rascal! This was what you were doing this
morning. You helped Stavrogin, you came in the carriage, you helped her
into it... it was you, you, you! Yulia Mihailovna, he is your enemy; he
will be your ruin too! Beware of him!"

And I ran headlong out of the house. I wonder myself and cannot make out
to this day how I came to say that to him. But I guessed quite right:
it had all happened almost exactly as I said, as appeared later. What
struck me most was the obviously artificial way in which he broke
the news. He had not told it at once on entering the house as an
extraordinary piece of news, but pretended that we knew without his
telling us which was impossible in so short a time. And if we had known
it, we could not possibly have refrained from mentioning it till he
introduced the subject. Besides, he could not have heard yet that the
town was "ringing with gossip" about the marshal's wife in so short a
time. Besides, he had once or twice given a vulgar, frivolous smile
as he told the story, probably considering that we were fools and
completely taken in.

But I had no thought to spare for him; the central fact I believed, and
ran from Yulia Mihailovna's, beside myself. The catastrophe cut me
to the heart. I was wounded almost to