or, and saying to her, as he held her hand, "You know who
it is draws me here; you know why I am constantly coming to your house;
what need of words when all is clear as it is?" Lisa did not speak,
and looked on the ground, without smiling, with her brows slightly
contracted, and a flush on her cheek, but she did not draw away her
hands. While up-stairs, in Marfa Timofyevna's room, by the light of a
little lamp hanging before the tarnished old holy images, Lavretsky was
sitting in a low chair, his elbows on his knees and his face buried in
his hands; the old woamn, standing before him, now and then silently
stroked his hair. He spent more than an hour with her, after taking
leave of his hostess; he had scarcely said anything to his kind old
friend, and she did not question him.... Indeed, what need to speak,
what was there to ask? Without that she understood all, and felt for
everything of which his heart was full.

Chapter VIII

Fedor Ivanitch Lavretsky--we must ask the reader's permission to break
off the thread of our story for a time--came of an old noble family. The
founder of the house of Lavretskky came over from Prussia in the reign
of Vassili the Blind, and received a grant of two hundred chetverts of
land in Byezhetsk. Many of his descendants filled various offices, and
served under princes and persons of eminence in outlying districts,
but not one of them rose above the rank of an inspector of the Imperial
table nor acquired any considerable fortune. The richest and
most distinguished of all the Lavretskys was Fedor Ivanitch's
great-grandfather, Andrei, a man cruel and daring, cunning and able.
Even to this day stories still linger of his tyranny, his savage temper,
his reckless munificence, and his insatiable avarice. He was very stout
and tall, swarthy of countenance and beardless, he spoke in a thick
voice and seemed half asleep; but the more quietly he spoke the more
those about him trembled. He had managed to get a wife who was a fit
match for him. She was a gipsy by birth, goggle-eyed and hook-nosed,
with a round yellow face. She was irascible and vindictive, and never
gave way in anything to her husband, who almost killed her, and whose
death she did not survive, though she had been for ever quarrelling with
him. The son of Andrei, Piotr, Fedor's grandfather, did not take
after his father; he was a typical landowner of the steppes, rather a
simpleton, loud-voiced, but slow to move, coarse but no