nd stood stiffly
upright before her, as I used to stand facing my father when he was
going to beat me; she looked into my face and I could see from her
eyes that she understood why I was confused.

"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "If you don't want
to come, you see, I have come to you."

She got up and came close to me.

"Don't desert me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
alone, utterly alone."

She began crying; and, hiding her face in her muff, articulated:

"Alone! My life is hard, very hard, and in all the world I have no
one but you. Don't desert me!"

Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears she smiled; we were
silent for some time, then I put my arms round her and kissed her,
scratching my cheek till it bled with her hatpin as I did it.

And we began talking to each other as though we had been on the
closest terms for ages and ages.

X

Two days later she sent me to Dubetchnya and I was unutterably
delighted to go. As I walked towards the station and afterwards,
as I was sitting in the train, I kept laughing from no apparent
cause, and people looked at me as though I were drunk. Snow was
falling, and there were still frosts in the mornings, but the roads
were already dark-coloured and rooks hovered over them, cawing.

At first I had intended to fit up an abode for us two, Masha and
me, in the lodge at the side opposite Madame Tcheprakov's lodge,
but it appeared that the doves and the ducks had been living there
for a long time, and it was impossible to clean it without destroying
a great number of nests. There was nothing for it but to live in
the comfortless rooms of the big house with the sunblinds. The
peasants called the house the palace; there were more than twenty
rooms in it, and the only furniture was a piano and a child's
arm-chair lying in the attic. And if Masha had brought all her
furniture from the town we should even then have been unable to get
rid of the impression of immense emptiness and cold. I picked out
three small rooms with windows looking into the garden, and worked
from early morning till night, setting them to rights, putting in
new panes, papering the walls, filling up the holes and chinks in
the floors. It was easy, pleasant work. I was continually running
to the river to see whether the ice were not going; I kept fancying
that starlings were flying. And at night, thinking of Masha, I
listened with an unutterably sweet feeling, with clutch