y with the artist.

"My paints and brushes I will leave with you, Ryabovsky," she said. "You
can bring what's left.... Mind, now, don't be lazy here when I am gone;
don't mope, but work. You are such a splendid fellow, Ryabovsky!"

At ten o'clock Ryabovsky gave her a farewell kiss, in order, as she
thought, to avoid kissing her on the steamer before the artists, and
went with her to the landing-stage. The steamer soon came up and carried
her away.

She arrived home two and a half days later. Breathless with excitement,
she went, without taking off her hat or waterproof, into the
drawing-room and thence into the dining-room. Dymov, with his waistcoat
unbuttoned and no coat, was sitting at the table sharpening a knife on a
fork; before him lay a grouse on a plate. As Olga Ivanovna went into the
flat she was convinced that it was essential to hide everything from her
husband, and that she would have the strength and skill to do so; but
now, when she saw his broad, mild, happy smile, and shining, joyful
eyes, she felt that to deceive this man was as vile, as revolting, and
as impossible and out of her power as to bear false witness, to steal,
or to kill, and in a flash she resolved to tell him all that had
happened. Letting him kiss and embrace her, she sank down on her knees
before him and hid her face.

"What is it, what is it, little mother?" he asked tenderly. "Were you
homesick?"

She raised her face, red with shame, and gazed at him with a guilty and
imploring look, but fear and shame prevented her from telling him the
truth.

"Nothing," she said; "it's just nothing...."

"Let us sit down," he said, raising her and seating her at the table.
"That's right, eat the grouse. You are starving, poor darling."

She eagerly breathed in the atmosphere of home and ate the grouse, while
he watched her with tenderness and laughed with delight.

VI

Apparently, by the middle of the winter Dymov began to suspect that he
was being deceived. As though his conscience was not clear, he could not
look his wife straight in the face, did not smile with delight when he
met her, and to avoid being left alone with her, he often brought in
to dinner his colleague, Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a
wrinkled face, who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer jacket with
embarrassment when he talked with Olga Ivanovna, and then with his right
hand nipped his left moustache. At dinner the two doctors talked about
the