man, gave him food, brought tea, cleared the table in
silence. Once she fell into trouble: Passing hurriedly through
the room she lost one of the overshoes which she had on her feet:

"Ah! may thou be!--they fall off every moment!" grumbled she, and
for some minutes she struggled with that overshoe, which,
dropping from her foot, slipped along the floor noisily.
Kranitski raised his head:

"What is that?" inquired he.

She made no answer, but when she was near the kitchen door, he
cried:

"What have you on your feet that clatter so? It is irritating!"

She stopped at the door:

"What have I on my feet? Well, your old overshoes! Am I to wear
out shoes every day, and then buy new ones? 'Irritating!' Arabian
adventure! God grant that you never have worse irritation than
overshoes clattering on the floor!"

And she grumbled on in the kitchen while going with an empty
glass to the samovar:

"You wouldn't have a pinch of tea in the house if I went around
in new shoes all my time!"

Darkness came down. Kranitski smoked cigarettes one after
another, and was so sunk in thought that he trembled throughout
his body. When widow Clemens brought in a lamp, with a
milk-colored globe, which filled the room with a white, mild
light, Kranitski looked at the head of the old woman in the white
lamp-light, and, for the first time in a number of hours, he
spoke:

"Come, mother, come nearer!" said he.

When she came he seized her rude fist in both his hands and shook
it vigorously.

"What could I do; what would happen to me now, if you were not
with me? No living soul of my own here! Alone, alone, as in a
desert."

The onrush of tenderness burst through all obstructions.
Confidences flowed on. He had loved for the last time in life, le
dernier amour, and all had ended. She had forbidden him to see
her. That decision of hers had been ripening for a long time.
Reproaches of conscience, shame, despair as to her children. One
daughter knew everything; the other might know it any day. She
had let out of her hands the rudder of those hearts and
consciences, for when she was talking with them her own fault
closed her lips, like a red-hot seal. She thought herself the
most pitiful of creatures. She did not wish to make further use
of her husband's wealth, or the position which it give her in
society. She wished to go away, to settle down in some silent
corner, vanish from the eyes of people.

Kranitski was so excited that he al