bs as soon as he came into the hall, and flung
himself on his mother's neck. The little girls, trembling, wondered
with terror what would happen next. They saw their father take
Volodya and Lentilov into his study, and there he talked to them a
long while.

"Is this a proper thing to do?" their father said to them. "I only
pray they won't hear of it at school, you would both be expelled.
You ought to be ashamed, Mr. Lentilov, really. It's not at all the
thing to do! You began it, and I hope you will be punished by your
parents. How could you? Where did you spend the night?"

"At the station," Lentilov answered proudly.

Then Volodya went to bed, and had a compress, steeped in vinegar,
on his forehead.

A telegram was sent off, and next day a lady, Lentilov's mother,
made her appearance and bore off her son.

Lentilov looked morose and haughty to the end, and he did not utter
a single word at taking leave of the little girls. But he took
Katya's book and wrote in it as a souvenir: "Montehomo, the Hawk's
Claw, Chief of the Ever Victorious."

SHROVE TUESDAY

"PAVEL VASSILITCH!" cries Pelageya Ivanovna, waking her husband.
"Pavel Vassilitch! You might go and help Styopa with his lessons,
he is sitting crying over his book. He can't understand something
again!"

Pavel Vassilitch gets up, makes the sign of the cross over his mouth
as he yawns, and says softly: "In a minute, my love!"

The cat who has been asleep beside him gets up too, straightens out
its tail, arches its spine, and half-shuts its eyes. There is
stillness. . . . Mice can be heard scurrying behind the wall-paper.
Putting on his boots and his dressing-gown, Pavel Vassilitch,
crumpled and frowning from sleepiness, comes out of his bedroom
into the dining-room; on his entrance another cat, engaged in
sniffing a marinade of fish in the window, jumps down to the floor,
and hides behind the cupboard.

"Who asked you to sniff that!" he says angrily, covering the fish
with a sheet of newspaper. "You are a pig to do that, not a cat. . . ."

From the dining-room there is a door leading into the nursery.
There, at a table covered with stains and deep scratches, sits
Styopa, a high-school boy in the second class, with a peevish
expression of face and tear-stained eyes. With his knees raised
almost to his chin, and his hands clasped round them, he is swaying
to and fro like a Chinese idol and looking crossly at a sum book.

"Are you working?" asks Pavel