y
candlelight. "Thank you for coming to kill time with me. May God give
you health. Mother in Heaven!" She spoke very sedately, very
judiciously, imitating her husband. The veterinary surgeon had
disappeared behind the door when she called out after him: "Do you
know, Vladimir Platonych, you ought to make up with your wife. Forgive
her, if only for the sake of your son. The child understands
everything, you may be sure."

When Pustovalov returned, she told him in a low voice about the
veterinary surgeon and his unhappy family life; and they sighed and
shook their heads, and talked about the boy who must be homesick for
his father. Then, by a strange association of ideas, they both stopped
before the sacred images, made genuflections, and prayed to God to
send them children.

And so the Pustovalovs lived for full six years, quietly and
peaceably, in perfect love and harmony. But once in the winter Vasily
Andreyich, after drinking some hot tea, went out into the lumber-yard
without a hat on his head, caught a cold and took sick. He was treated
by the best physicians, but the malady progressed, and he died after
an illness of four months. Olenka was again left a widow.

"To whom have you left me, my darling?" she wailed after the funeral.
"How shall I live now without you, wretched creature that I am. Pity
me, good people, pity me, fatherless and motherless, all alone in the
world!"

She went about dressed in black and weepers, and she gave up wearing
hats and gloves for good. She hardly left the house except to go to
church and to visit her husband's grave. She almost led the life of a
nun.

It was not until six months had passed that she took off the weepers
and opened her shutters. She began to go out occasionally in the
morning to market with her cook. But how she lived at home and what
went on there, could only be surmised. It could be surmised from the
fact that she was seen in her little garden drinking tea with the
veterinarian while he read the paper out loud to her, and also from
the fact that once on meeting an acquaintance at the post-office, she
said to her:

"There is no proper veterinary inspection in our town. That is why
there is so much disease. You constantly hear of people getting sick
from the milk and becoming infected by the horses and cows. The health
of domestic animals ought really to be looked after as much as that of
human beings."

She repeated the veterinarian's words and held the s