and panic-stricken face, and realized
that he was not joking.

"9,499?" she asked, turning pale and dropping the folded tablecloth on
the table.

"Yes, yes... it really is there!"

"And the number of the ticket?"

"Oh, yes! There's the number of the ticket too. But stay... wait! No,
I say! Anyway, the number of our series is there! Anyway, you
understand...."

Looking at his wife, Ivan Dmitritch gave a broad, senseless smile, like
a baby when a bright object is shown it. His wife smiled too; it was as
pleasant to her as to him that he only mentioned the series, and did
not try to find out the number of the winning ticket. To torment
and tantalize oneself with hopes of possible fortune is so sweet, so
thrilling!

"It is our series," said Ivan Dmitritch, after a long silence. "So there
is a probability that we have won. It's only a probability, but there it
is!"

"Well, now look!"

"Wait a little. We have plenty of time to be disappointed. It's on the
second line from the top, so the prize is seventy-five thousand. That's
not money, but power, capital! And in a minute I shall look at the list,
and there--26! Eh? I say, what if we really have won?"

The husband and wife began laughing and staring at one another in
silence. The possibility of winning bewildered them; they could not have
said, could not have dreamed, what they both needed that seventy-five
thousand for, what they would buy, where they would go. They thought
only of the figures 9,499 and 75,000 and pictured them in their
imagination, while somehow they could not think of the happiness itself
which was so possible.

Ivan Dmitritch, holding the paper in his hand, walked several times
from corner to corner, and only when he had recovered from the first
impression began dreaming a little.

"And if we have won," he said--"why, it will be a new life, it will be a
transformation! The ticket is yours, but if it were mine I should, first
of all, of course, spend twenty-five thousand on real property in
the shape of an estate; ten thousand on immediate expenses, new
furnishing... travelling... paying debts, and so on.... The other forty
thousand I would put in the bank and get interest on it."

"Yes, an estate, that would be nice," said his wife, sitting down and
dropping her hands in her lap.

"Somewhere in the Tula or Oryol provinces.... In the first place we
shouldn't need a summer villa, and besides, it would always bring in an
income."

And p