Insensibly he wandered into an outlying suburban district; where, having dined at a shabby restaurant, he resumed his perambulations. Behind him stretched long rows of grey and yellow walls, while, in front, decrepit shanties were beginning to take the place of the richer mansions, with, among them, towering buildings cheek by jowl with factories—buildings which were monstrous, blackened, reddish in colour, and topped by tall chimneys. Here the prospect was empty and desolate; everything, to Ordynov’s eye, looked sullen and unfriendly under the approach of night. Traversing a long alley-way, he issued into a square which encompassed a church.

Hardly knowing what he was doing, he entered the sacred edifice. A service had just come to an end, and the building was practically empty, save for two old women who were still kneeling near the entrance, and the verger (a little old man) who was engaged in extinguishing the candles. The slanting rays of the sun were throwing great waves of colour through the narrow windows of the dome, and flooding one of the transepts with a sea of light as they slowly ebbed; while the shadows, growing darker and darker as they massed themselves under the arches, were causing the gilt on the sacred images to glitter the more brightly in the intermittent, reddish gleam of lamps and candles. A prey to painful emotions and a sort of crushed feeling, Ordynov seated himself against the wall in one of the darkest corners of the church, and for a moment sank into oblivion. Presently he was recalled to himself by the sound of two persons entering the building with dull, measured footsteps. Looking up, he felt an indefinable curiosity possess him. The newcomers were an old man and a girl. The former—a man who, though tall, vigorous, and upright, was sadly wasted and unhealthily pale—might have been a merchant from some remote province. Clad in a long coat of black fur which, unfastened, showed a tunic neatly buttoned from chin to waist, he had his bare neck swathed in a scarlet muffler, and in his hand a fur cap. A long grey beard covered his breast, and from under menacing, bushy eyebrows his glance shone with a feverish light and a sort of slow, yet haughty and penetrating, air. As for the girl, she might have been about twenty. Marvellously beautiful, and dressed in a jacket of some rich, dark, glossy fur, with a white satin scarf tied over her head and knotted under her chin, she walked with her eyes cast down and a sort of meditative gravity on her face which imparted to the tender, gentle lines of her childlike countenance a sort of clear-cut, yet mournful, air. Somehow to Ordynov there seemed something strange in the aspect of this couple.

When half-way up the aisle, the old man halted, and made the sign of the cross towards every side of him, although the church was now empty. His companion did the same. Then he took her by the hand, and led her towards the statue of the Virgin, the Lady Patroness of the church. The image stood near the altar, and its ornaments of precious stones and brilliant gold were glittering with a dazzling sheen. The verger greeted the stranger with a respectful bow, and was accorded, in return, a slight acknowledgment of his salute; after which the young girl fell upon her knees before the statue, and, the old man having taken a church napkin and covered her head with it, a sound of deep sobbing became audible throughout the building.