Martha, and her perpetual tears and quarrels,
that she determined to get on without her, the more so that her
daughter's governess was also traveling with her. Her company was
growing too numerous.

There was no limit to Martha's wrath when she learned that she was
going to be left behind. Her effrontery was so great that she advised
her mistress "for her own sake" not to put such an affront upon her,
since she would not submit to it without seeking revenge. But her
mistress never dreamed of what Martha was planning, and what a risk
she ran.

Hardly had the general's wife departed when Martha asked the general
to let her leave, saying she would find work elsewhere. The general
saw no way of keeping her; and he did not even wish to do so, thinking
her only a quarrelsome, ill-tempered woman. The confidential servant
left the house, and even the city. And immediately her revenge and
torture of the general began, cutting straight at the root of his
happiness, his health, even his life. He began to receive, almost
daily, letters from different parts of Russia, for Martha had plenty
of friends and chums. With measureless cruelty Martha began by sending
the less important documents, still signed with her mistress' maiden
name; then two or three letters from the series of the most recent
times, and finally there came a whole packet of those sent by the
general's wife to the tutor, in the first year of her marriage with
the general, before Borisoff had met Anna.

The crafty Martha, knowing perfectly the whole state of affairs to
which these letters referred, often copied out their contents, and
kept the letters themselves concealed, saying to herself, "God knows
what may turn up, some day!

"If they are no use, I can burn them. But they may be useful. It is
always a good thing to keep our masters in our power," argued the
sagacious woman, and she was not mistaken in her calculations,
although these letters served not for her profit, but only for a
sanguinary revenge.

These notes and letters, which finally opened his eyes to the true
character of his wife, and his own crying injustice to his elder
children, were now lying in the general's dispatch box, in a neatly
tied packet, directed in the doctor's handwriting to "Her Excellency
Olga Vseslavovna Nazimoff."

As soon as she received her father's first letter Anna began to get
ready to go to St. Petersburg, but unfortunately she was kept back by
the sickness, first of