The innkeeper
was going out of the house to the courtyard. It all turned out contrary
to what Stepan desired. He had no opportunity of using the knife;
he just swung the axe and split the innkeeper's head in two. The man
tumbled down on the threshold of the door, then on the ground.

Stepan stepped into the bedroom. Matrena jumped out of bed, and remained
standing by its side. With the same axe Stepan killed her also.

Then he lighted the candle, took the money out of the desk, and left the
house.

XVI

IN a small district town, some distance away from the other buildings,
an old man, a former official, who had taken to drink, lived in his own
house with his two daughters and his son-in-law. The married daughter
was also addicted to drink and led a bad life, and it was the elder
daughter, the widow Maria Semenovna, a wrinkled woman of fifty, who
supported the whole family. She had a pension of two hundred and fifty
roubles a year, and the family lived on this. Maria Semenovna did all
the work in the house, looked after the drunken old father, who was very
weak, attended to her sister's child, and managed all the cooking and
the washing of the family. And, as is always the case, whatever there
was to do, she was expected to do it, and was, moreover, continually
scolded by all the three people in the house; her brother-in-law used
even to beat her when he was drunk. She bore it all patiently, and as
is also always the case, the more work she had to face, the quicker
she managed to get through it. She helped the poor, sacrificing her own
wants; she gave them her clothes, and was a ministering angel to the
sick.

Once the lame, crippled village tailor was working in Maria Semenovna's
house. He had to mend her old father's coat, and to mend and repair
Maria Semenovna's fur-jacket for her to wear in winter when she went to
market.

The lame tailor was a clever man, and a keen observer: he had seen many
different people owing to his profession, and was fond of reflection,
condemned as he was to a sedentary life.

Having worked a week at Maria Semenovna's, he wondered greatly about
her life. One day she came to the kitchen, where he was sitting with his
work, to wash a towel, and began to ask him how he was getting on. He
told her of the wrong he had suffered from his brother, and how he now
lived on his own allotment of land, separated from that of his brother.

"I thought I should have been better off that way," h