y chance for some
unknown reason. Anisim went up to her and just touched her cheek with
his lips.

"Good-bye," he said.

And without looking at him she gave a strange smile; her face began to
quiver, and everyone for some reason felt sorry for her. Anisim, too,
leaped into the chaise with a bound and put his arms jauntily akimbo,
for he considered himself a good-looking fellow.

When they drove up out of the ravine Anisim kept looking back towards
the village. It was a warm, bright day. The cattle were being driven out
for the first time, and the peasant girls and women were walking by the
herd in their holiday dresses. The dun-coloured bull bellowed, glad to
be free, and pawed the ground with his forefeet. On all sides, above and
below, the larks were singing. Anisim looked round at the elegant white
church--it had only lately been whitewashed--and he thought how he had
been praying in it five days before; he looked round at the school with
its green roof, at the little river in which he used once to bathe and
catch fish, and there was a stir of joy in his heart, and he wished that
walls might rise up from the ground and prevent him from going further,
and that he might be left with nothing but the past.

At the station they went to the refreshment room and drank a glass of
sherry each. His father felt in his pocket for his purse to pay.

"I will stand treat," said Anisim. The old man, touched and delighted,
slapped him on the shoulder, and winked to the waiter as much as to say,
"See what a fine son I have got."

"You ought to stay at home in the business, Anisim," he said; "you would
be worth any price to me! I would shower gold on you from head to foot,
my son."

"It can't be done, papa."

The sherry was sour and smelt of sealing-wax, but they had another
glass.

When old Tsybukin returned home from the station, for the first moment
he did not recognize his younger daughter-in-law. As soon as her husband
had driven out of the yard, Lipa was transformed and suddenly brightened
up. Wearing a threadbare old petticoat, with her feet bare and her
sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the
entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a
big tub of dirty water and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile
it seemed as though she, too, were a lark.

An old labourer who was passing by the door shook his head and cleared
his throat.

"Yes, indeed, your da