t in suddenly, catching the last word, and without
looking at it she put out her left hand for the roll (she had heard
something about the roll too very likely). She got hold of the roll
at last and after keeping it for some time in her left hand, while her
attention was distracted by the conversation which sprang up again, she
put it back again on the table unconsciously without having taken a bite
of it.

"It always comes out the same, a journey, a wicked man, somebody's
treachery, a death-bed, a letter, unexpected news. I think it's all
nonsense. Shatushka, what do you think? If people can tell lies why
shouldn't a card?" She suddenly threw the cards together again. "I said
the same thing to Mother Praskovya, she's a very venerable woman, she
used to run to my cell to tell her fortune on the cards, without letting
the Mother Superior know. Yes, and she wasn't the only one who came to
me. They sigh, and shake their heads at me, they talk it over while I
laugh. 'Where are you going to get a letter from, Mother Praskovya,' I
say, 'when you haven't had one for twelve years?' Her daughter had been
taken away to Turkey by her husband, and for twelve years there had been
no sight nor sound of her. Only I was sitting the next evening at tea
with the Mother Superior (she was a princess by birth), there was some
lady there too, a visitor, a great dreamer, and a little monk from Athos
was sitting there too, a rather absurd man to my thinking. What do you
think, Shatushka, that monk from Athos had brought Mother Praskovya a
letter from her daughter in Turkey, that morning--so much for the knave
of diamonds--unexpected news! We were drinking our tea, and the monk
from Athos said to the Mother Superior, 'Blessed Mother Superior, God
has blessed your convent above all things in that you preserve so great
a treasure in its precincts,' said he. 'What treasure is that?' asked
the Mother Superior. 'The Mother Lizaveta, the Blessed.' This Lizaveta
the Blessed was enshrined in the nunnery wall, in a cage seven feet long
and five feet high, and she had been sitting there for seventeen years
in nothing but a hempen shift, summer and winter, and she always kept
pecking at the hempen cloth with a straw or a twig of some sort, and she
never said a word, and never combed her hair, or washed, for seventeen
years. In the winter they used to put a sheepskin in for her, and every
day a piece of bread and a jug of water. The pilgrims gaze at her, si