about with a tear-stained and heavily
powdered face, and at dinner she kept sighing and looking towards
the ikon. And it was impossible to make out what was the matter
with her. But at last she made up her mind, went in to Vera, and
said in a casual way:

"The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and
the tenant hasn't paid his rent. Will you let me pay it out of the
fifteen thousand your papa left you?"

All day afterwards Auntie Dasha spent in making cherry jam in the
garden. Alyona, with her cheeks flushed with the heat, ran to and
from the garden to the house and back again to the cellar.

When Auntie Dasha was making jam with a very serious face as though
she were performing a religious rite, and her short sleeves displayed
her strong, little, despotic hands and arms, and when the servants
ran about incessantly, bustling about the jam which they would never
taste, there was always a feeling of martyrdom in the air. . . .

The garden smelt of hot cherries. The sun had set, the charcoal
stove had been carried away, but the pleasant, sweetish smell still
lingered in the air. Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched
a new labourer, a young soldier, not of the neighbourhood, who was,
by her express orders, making new paths. He was cutting the turf
with a spade and heaping it up on a barrow.

"Where were you serving?" Vera asked him.

"At Berdyansk."

"And where are you going now? Home?"

"No," answered the labourer. "I have no home."

"But where were you born and brought up?"

"In the province of Oryol. Till I went into the army I lived with
my mother, in my step-father's house; my mother was the head of the
house, and people looked up to her, and while she lived I was cared
for. But while I was in the army I got a letter telling me my mother
was dead. . . . And now I don't seem to care to go home. It's not
my own father, so it's not like my own home."

"Then your father is dead?"

"I don't know. I am illegitimate."

At that moment Auntie Dasha appeared at the window and said:

"_Il ne faut pas parler aux gens . . . ._ Go into the kitchen, my
good man. You can tell your story there," she said to the soldier.

And then came as yesterday and every day supper, reading, a sleepless
night, and endless thinking about the same thing. At three o'clock
the sun rose; Alyona was already busy in the corridor, and Vera was
not asleep yet and was trying to read. She heard the creak of the