om where has God sent you?"

"I want to settle here for good," he told her. "I have resigned my
position and have come here to try my fortune as a free man and lead a
settled life. Besides, it's time to send my boy to the gymnasium. He
is grown up now. You know, my wife and I have become reconciled."

"Where is she?" asked Olenka.

"At the hotel with the boy. I am looking for lodgings."

"Good gracious, bless you, take my house. Why won't my house do? Oh,
dear! Why, I won't ask any rent of you," Olenka burst out in the
greatest excitement, and began to cry again. "You live here, and the
wing will be enough for me. Oh, Heavens, what a joy!"

The very next day the roof was being painted and the walls
whitewashed, and Olenka, arms akimbo, was going about the yard
superintending. Her face brightened with her old smile. Her whole
being revived and freshened, as though she had awakened from a long
sleep. The veterinarian's wife and child arrived. She was a thin,
plain woman, with a crabbed expression. The boy Sasha, small for his
ten years of age, was a chubby child, with clear blue eyes and dimples
in his cheeks. He made for the kitten the instant he entered the yard,
and the place rang with his happy laughter.

"Is that your cat, auntie?" he asked Olenka. "When she has little
kitties, please give me one. Mamma is awfully afraid of mice."

Olenka chatted with him, gave him tea, and there was a sudden warmth
in her bosom and a soft gripping at her heart, as though the boy were
her own son.

In the evening, when he sat in the dining-room studying his lessons,
she looked at him tenderly and whispered to herself:

"My darling, my pretty. You are such a clever child, so good to look
at."

"An island is a tract of land entirely surrounded by water," he
recited.

"An island is a tract of land," she repeated--the first idea
asseverated with conviction after so many years of silence and mental
emptiness.

She now had her opinions, and at supper discussed with Sasha's parents
how difficult the studies had become for the children at the
gymnasium, but how, after all, a classical education was better than a
commercial course, because when you graduated from the gymnasium then
the road was open to you for any career at all. If you chose to, you
could become a doctor, or, if you wanted to, you could become an
engineer.

Sasha began to go to the gymnasium. His mother left on a visit to her
sister in Kharkov and never came