ollowed her mother. Nikolai Petrovitch led her to the window and took
her head in his two hands. After thoroughly examining her red and
swollen eye, he prescribed a fomentation, which he made up himself at
once, and tearing his handkerchief in pieces, he showed her how it
ought to be applied. Fenitchka listened to all he had to say, and then
was going. 'Kiss the master's hand, silly girl,' said Arina. Nikolai
Petrovitch did not give her his hand, and in confusion himself kissed
her bent head on the parting of her hair. Fenitchka's eye was soon well
again, but the impression she had made on Nikolai Petrovitch did not
pass away so quickly. He was for ever haunted by that pure, delicate,
timidly raised face; he felt on the palms of his hands that soft hair,
and saw those innocent, slightly parted lips, through which pearly
teeth gleamed with moist brilliance in the sunshine. He began to watch
her with great attention in church, and tried to get into conversation
with her. At first she was shy of him, and one day meeting him at the
approach of evening in a narrow footpath through a field of rye, she
ran into the tall thick rye, overgrown with cornflowers and wormwood,
so as not to meet him face to face. He caught sight of her little head
through a golden network of ears of rye, from which she was peeping out
like a little animal, and called affectionately to her--

'Good-evening, Fenitchka! I don't bite.'

'Good-evening,' she whispered, not coming out of her ambush.

By degrees she began to be more at home with him, but was still shy in
his presence, when suddenly her mother, Arina, died of cholera. What
was to become of Fenitchka? She inherited from her mother a love for
order, regularity, and respectability; but she was so young, so alone.
Nikolai Petrovitch was himself so good and considerate.... It's
needless to relate the rest....

'So my brother came in to see you?' Nikolai Petrovitch questioned her.
'He knocked and came in?'

'Yes.'

'Well, that's a good thing. Let me give Mitya a swing.'

And Nikolai Petrovitch began tossing him almost up to the ceiling, to
the huge delight of the baby, and to the considerable uneasiness of the
mother, who every time he flew up stretched her arms up towards his
little bare legs.

Pavel Petrovitch went back to his artistic study, with its walls
covered with handsome bluish-grey hangings, with weapons hanging upon a
variegated Persian rug nailed to the wall; with walnut furni