" cried Uzelkov, frowning. "If you couldn't or
wouldn't have given it her, you might have written to me. . . . And
I didn't know! I didn't know!"

"My dear fellow, what use would it have been for me to write,
considering that she wrote to you herself when she was lying in the
hospital afterwards?"

"Yes, but I was so taken up then with my second marriage. I was in
such a whirl that I had no thoughts to spare for letters. . . . But
you were an outsider, you had no antipathy for Sofya. . . why didn't
you give her a helping hand? . . ."

"You can't judge by the standards of to-day, Boris Petrovitch;
that's how we look at it now, but at the time we thought very
differently. . . . Now maybe I'd give her a thousand roubles, but
then even that ten-rouble note I did not give her for nothing. It
was a bad business! . . . We must forget it. . . . But here we
are. . . ."

The sledge stopped at the cemetery gates. Uzelkov and Shapkin got
out of the sledge, went in at the gate, and walked up a long, broad
avenue. The bare cherry-trees and acacias, the grey crosses and
tombstones, were silvered with hoar-frost, every little grain of
snow reflected the bright, sunny day. There was the smell there
always is in cemeteries, the smell of incense and freshly dug
earth. . . .

"Our cemetery is a pretty one," said Uzelkov, "quite a garden!"

"Yes, but it is a pity thieves steal the tombstones. . . . And over
there, beyond that iron monument on the right, Sofya Mihailovna is
buried. Would you like to see?"

The friends turned to the right and walked through the deep snow
to the iron monument.

"Here it is," said Shapkin, pointing to a little slab of white
marble. "A lieutenant put the stone on her grave."

Uzelkov slowly took off his cap and exposed his bald head to the
sun. Shapkin, looking at him, took off his cap too, and another
bald patch gleamed in the sunlight. There was the stillness of the
tomb all around as though the air, too, were dead. The friends
looked at the grave, pondered, and said nothing.

"She sleeps in peace," said Shapkin, breaking the silence. "It's
nothing to her now that she took the blame on herself and drank
brandy. You must own, Boris Petrovitch . . . ."

"Own what?" Uzelkov asked gloomily.

"Why. . . . However hateful the past, it was better than this."

And Shapkin pointed to his grey head.

"I used not to think of the hour of death. . . . I fancied I could
have given death points and won the