you remember how I pranced about like a needle, like
an enthusiastic ass at those private theatricals when I was courting
Zina? It was stupid, but it was good, it was fun. . . . The very
memory of it brings back a whiff of spring. . . . And now! What a
cruel change of scene! There is a subject for you! Only don't you
go in for writing 'the diary of a suicide.' That's vulgar and
conventional. You make something humorous of it."

"Again you are . . . posing," I said. "There's nothing humorous in
your position."

"Nothing laughable? You say nothing laughable?" Vassilyev sat up,
and tears glistened in his eyes. An expression of bitter distress
came into his pale face. His chin quivered.

"You laugh at the deceit of cheating clerks and faithless wives,"
he said, "but no clerk, no faithless wife has cheated as my fate
has cheated me! I have been deceived as no bank depositor, no duped
husband has ever been deceived! Only realise what an absurd fool I
have been made! Last year before your eyes I did not know what to
do with myself for happiness. And now before your eyes. . . ."

Vassilyev's head sank on the pillow and he laughed.

"Nothing more absurd and stupid than such a change could possibly
be imagined. Chapter one: spring, love, honeymoon . . . honey, in
fact; chapter two: looking for a job, the pawnshop, pallor, the
chemist's shop, and . . . to-morrow's splashing through the mud to
the graveyard."

He laughed again. I felt acutely uncomfortable and made up my mind
to go.

"I tell you what," I said, "you lie down, and I will go to the
chemist's."

He made no answer. I put on my great-coat and went out of his room.
As I crossed the passage I glanced at the coffin and Madame Mimotih
reading over it. I strained my eyes in vain, I could not recognise
in the swarthy, yellow face Zina, the lively, pretty _ingenue_ of
Luhatchev's company.

"_Sic transit_," I thought.

With that I went out, not forgetting to take the revolver, and made
my way to the chemist's. But I ought not to have gone away. When I
came back from the chemist's, Vassilyev lay on the sofa fainting.
The bandages had been roughly torn off, and blood was flowing from
the reopened wound. It was daylight before I succeeded in restoring
him to consciousness. He was raving in delirium, shivering, and
looking with unseeing eyes about the room till morning had come,
and we heard the booming voice of the priest as he read the service
over the dead.

When