Vassilyev's rooms were crowded with old women and mutes, when
the coffin had been moved and carried out of the yard, I advised
him to remain at home. But he would not obey me, in spite of the
pain and the grey, rainy morning. He walked bareheaded and in silence
behind the coffin all the way to the cemetery, hardly able to move
one leg after the other, and from time to time clutching convulsively
at his wounded side. His face expressed complete apathy. Only once
when I roused him from his lethargy by some insignificant question
he shifted his eyes over the pavement and the grey fence, and for
a moment there was a gleam of gloomy anger in them.

"'Weelright,'" he read on a signboard. "Ignorant, illiterate
people, devil take them!"

I led him home from the cemetery.

----

Only one year has passed since that night, and Vassilyev has hardly
had time to wear out the boots in which he tramped through the mud
behind his wife's coffin.

At the present time as I finish this story, he is sitting in my
drawing-room and, playing on the piano, is showing the ladies how
provincial misses sing sentimental songs. The ladies are laughing,
and he is laughing too. He is enjoying himself.

I call him into my study. Evidently not pleased at my taking him
from agreeable company, he comes to me and stands before me in the
attitude of a man who has no time to spare. I give him this story,
and ask him to read it. Always condescending about my authorship,
he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an
armchair and begins upon it.

"Hang it all, what horrors," he mutters with a smile.

But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face
becomes. At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns
terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When
he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner.

"How does it end?" I ask him.

"How does it end? H'm. . . ."

He looks at the room, at me, at himself. . . . He sees his new
fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and . . . sinking on a
chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.

"Wasn't I right when I told you it was all absurd? My God! I have
had burdens to bear that would have broken an elephant's back; the
devil knows what I have suffered--no one could have suffered more,
I think, and where are the traces? It's astonishing. One would have
thought the imprint made on a man by his agonies woul