Outside it was exactly like a stage-setting for The Night Before Christmas - snow and twinkling, shimmering lights. Nikolka peered through the window. Heat-haze and school house vanished as he strained his ears. Where was that sound? He shrugged his tabbed shoulders.

   'God knows. I get the impression it's coming from the Svyato-shino direction. Funny, though. It can't be as near as that.'

   Alexei was standing in the dark, but Elena was nearer to the window and her eyes were shadowed with fear. Why had Talberg still not come home? What did it mean? The elder brother sensed her anxiety and because of it he said nothing, although he very much wanted to speak his thoughts. There was not the slightest doubt that it was coming from Svyatoshino. The firing was no more than eight miles outside the City. What was going on?

   Nikolka gripped the window-catch and pressed his other hand against the pane as if to break it open, and flattened his nose against the glass.

   Td like to go out there and find out what's going on . . .'

   'Maybe; but it's no place for you right now . . .' said Elena anxiously. Her husband should have been home at the latest - the very latest - at three o'clock that afternoon, and now it was ten.

   They went silently back into the dining-room. The guitar lay glumly silent. Nikolka went out to the kitchen and carried in the samovar, which hissed angrily and spat. The table was laid with cups that were pastel-colored inside and decorated outside with gilded caryatids. In their mother's day this had been the family's best tea-service for special occasions, but her children now used it for everyday. Despite the gunfire, the alarms and anxiety, the tablecloth was white and starched. This was thanks to Elena, who instinctively saw to such things, and to Anyuta who had grown up in the Turbin household. The hem of the tablecloth gleamed, andalthough it was December, in the tall, pillar-shaped matt glass vase stood a bunch of blue hortensias and two languorous roses to affirm the beauty and permanency of life - despite the fact that out there, on the roads leading into the City, lay the cunning enemy, poised to crush the beautiful snowbound City and grind the shattered remnants of peace and quiet into fragments beneath the heel of his boot. The flowers were a present from Elena's faithful admirer, Lieutenant Leonid Shervinsky of the Guards, a friend of the salesgirl at La Marquise, the famous confectioners, and a friend of the salesgirl at the florist's shop, Les Fleurs de Nice. In the shadow of the hortensias was a blue-patterned plate with a few slices of sausage, butter under a glass bell, lumps of sugar in the sugar-bowl and a long loaf of white bread. Everything one could want for a delicious supper if only the situation . . .

   The teapot was covered by a bright woolen tea-cosy in the shape of a rooster, while the gleaming side of the samovar reflected the three distorted faces of the Turbins, making Nikolka's cheeks look as round and puffed as the face of Momus scribbled on the stove.

   Elena looked miserable and her red curls hung lankly down.

   Talberg and his trainload of the Hetman's money had gone astray somewhere, and the evening was ruined. Who knows what might have happened to him? The two brothers listlessly ate some slices of bread and sausage. A cold cup of tea and The Gentleman from San Francisco lay on the table in front of Elena.