y. He looked handsome and
well-bred; his intelligent grey eyes always preserved a dignified
expression; and he fulfilled his obligations of a fiance with
irreproachable gentleness.

The bride was also good-looking; she was a tall, dark-eyed,
dark-haired girl, somewhat timid but very tactful. He was not after
her dowry, though it pleased him to know that she had something. He
had connexions, and his wife came of good, influential people. This
might, at the proper opportunity, prove useful. Always irreproachable
and tactful, Nesletyev got on in his position not so fast that any one
should envy him, nor yet so slow that he should envy any one
else--everything came in the proper measure and at the proper time.

After their marriage there was nothing in the manner of Sergey
Modestovich to suggest anything wrong to his wife. Later, however,
when his wife was about to have a child, Sergey Modestovich
established connexions elsewhere of a light and temporary nature.
Serafima Aleksandrovna found this out, and, to her own astonishment,
was not particularly hurt; she awaited her infant with a restless
anticipation that swallowed every other feeling.

A little girl was born; Serafima Aleksandrovna gave herself up to her.
At the beginning she used to tell her husband, with rapture, of all
the joyous details of Lekchka's existence. But she soon found that he
listened to her without the slightest interest, and only from the
habit of politeness. Serafima Aleksandrovna drifted farther and
farther away from him. She loved her little girl with the ungratified
passion that other women, deceived in their husbands, show their
chance young lovers.

"_Mamochka_, let's play _priatki_" (hide and seek), cried Lelechka,
pronouncing the _r_ like the _l_, so that the word sounded "pliatki."

This charming inability to speak always made, Serafima Aleksandrovna
smile with tender rapture. Lelechka then ran away, stamping with her
plump little legs over the carpets, and hid herself behind the
curtains near her bed.

"_Tiu-tiu, mamochka!_" she cried out in her sweet, laughing voice, as
she looked out with a single roguish eye.

"Where is my baby girl?" the mother asked, as she looked for Lelechka
and made believe that she did not see her.

And Lelechka poured out her rippling laughter in her hiding place.
Then she came out a little farther, and her mother, as though she had
only just caught sight of her, seized her by her little shoulders and