ly at Lubov.

"Really?"

"There's a lady with him. A dark one."

"So."

"It looks as though the woman is out of her wits," said Yefim, with
a sigh. "She's forever singing. She sings very well. It's very
captivating."

"I am not asking you about her!" cried Mayakin, angrily. The wrinkles
of his face were painfully quivering, and it seemed to Lubov that her
father was about to weep.

"Calm yourself, papa!" she entreated caressingly. "Maybe the loss isn't
so great."

"Not great?" cried Yakov Tarasovich in a ringing voice. "What do you
understand, you fool? Is it only that the barge was smashed? Eh, you! A
man is lost! That's what it is! And he is essential to me! I need him,
dull devils that you are!" The old man shook his head angrily and with
brisk steps walked off along the garden path leading toward the house.

And Foma was at this time about four hundred versts away from his
godfather, in a village hut, on the shore of the Volga. He had just
awakened from sleep, and lying on the floor, on a bed of fresh hay, in
the middle of the hut, he gazed gloomily out of the window at the sky,
which was covered with gray, scattered clouds.

The wind was tearing them asunder and driving them somewhere; heavy and
weary, one overtaking another, they were passing across the sky in an
enormous flock. Now forming a solid mass, now breaking into fragments,
now falling low over the earth, in silent confusion, now again rising
upward, one swallowed by another.

Without moving his head, which was heavy from intoxication, Foma looked
long at the clouds and finally began to feel as though silent clouds
were also passing through his breast,--passing, breathing a damp
coldness upon his heart and oppressing him. There was something impotent
in the motion of the clouds across the sky. And he felt the same within
him. Without thinking, he pictured to himself all he had gone through
during the past months. It seemed to him as though he had fallen into a
turbid, boiling stream, and now he had been seized by dark waves, that
resembled these clouds in the sky; had been seized and carried away
somewhere, even as the clouds were carried by the wind. In the darkness
and the tumult which surrounded him, he saw as though through a mist
that certain other people were hastening together with him--to-day not
those of yesterday, new ones each day, yet all looking alike--equally
pitiful and repulsive. Intoxicated, noisy, greedy, they flew about
hi