es concerning the town and its families and
inhabitants. However, as soon as he descried the woman looming like a
ghost, he leapt to his feet in comical terror, then subsided on to the
straw again, contracted his body as though he were in convulsions, and
hurriedly made the sign of the cross.

"Oh Jesus our Lord!" he gasped. "Tell me what that is, tell me what
that is!"

"Keep quiet, you," I urged.

Instead, lurching in my direction, he nudged me with his arm,

"Is it Nadezhda, think you?" he whispered.

"It is."

"Phew! The scene seems like a dream. Just in the same way, and in the
very same place, did her mother-in-law, Petrushka's stepmother, use to
come and walk. Yes, it was just like this."

Then, rolling over, face downwards, he broke into subdued, malicious
chuckles; whereafter, seizing my hand and sawing it up and down, he
whispered amid his exultant pants:

"I expect Petrushka is asleep, for probably he has taken too much
liquor at the Bassanov's smotrini. [A festival at which a fiance pays
his first visit to the house of the parents of his betrothed.] Aye, he
will be asleep. And as for Jonah, HE will have gone to Vaska Klochi. So
tonight, until morning, Nadezhda will be able to kick up her heels to
her heart's content."

I too had begun to surmise that the woman was come thither for purposes
of her own. Yet the scene was almost dreamlike in its beauty. It
thrilled me to the soul to watch how the woman's blue eyes gazed about
her--gazed as though she were ardently, caressingly whispering to all
living creatures, asleep or awake:

"Oh my darlings! Oh my darlings!"

Beside me the uncouth, broken-down Gubin went on in hoarse accents:

"You must know that she is Petrushka's THIRD wife, a woman whom he took
to himself from the family of a merchant of Murom. Yet the town has it
that not only Petrushka, but also Jonah, makes use of her--that she
acts as wife to both brothers, and therefore lacks children. Also has
it been said of her that one Trinity Sunday she was seen by a party of
women to misconduct herself in this garden with a police sergeant, and
then to sit on his lap and weep. Yet this last I do not wholly believe,
for the sergeant in question is a veteran scarcely able to put one foot
before the other. Also, Jonah, though a brute, lives in abject fear of
his stepmother."

Here a worm-eaten apple fell to the ground, and the woman paused;
whereafter, with head a little raised, she resumed her