Four days later the old Princess Chechevinski was buried in the Nevski
monastery.

On his return from the monastery, young Prince Chechevinski went
straight for the strong box, which he had hitherto seen only at a
distance, and even then only rarely. He expected to find a great deal
more money in it than he found--some hundred and fifty thousand
rubles; a hundred thousand in his late mother's name, and fifty
thousand in his own. This was the personal property of the old
princess, a part of her dowry. The young prince made a wry face--the
money might last him two or three years, not more. During the lifetime
of the old princess no one had known accurately how much she
possessed, so that it never even entered the young prince's head to
ask whether she had not had more. He was so unmethodical that he never
even looked into her account book, deciding that it was uninteresting
and not worth while.

That same day the janitor of one of the huge, dirty tenements in
Vosnesenski Prospekt brought to the police office notice of the fact
that the Pole, Kasimir Bodlevski, had left the city; and the
housekeeper of the late Princess Chechevinski informed the police that
the serf girl Natalia Pavlovna (Natasha) had disappeared without
leaving a trace, which the housekeeper now announced, as the three
days' limit had elapsed.

At that same hour the little ship of a certain Finnish captain was
gliding down the Gulf of Bothnia. The Finn stood at the helm and his
young son handled the sails. On the deck sat a young man and a young
woman. The young woman carried, in a little bag hung round her neck,
two hundred and forty-four thousand rubles in bills, and she and her