where was the daughter? Where was Manetchka? I did not ask. I
did not dare to ask the old mother dressed in her new deep mourning.
And while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka
came out to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid
footstep. . . .

I understood, and my heart was heavy.

THE HELPMATE

"I'VE asked you not to tidy my table," said Nikolay Yevgrafitch.
"There's no finding anything when you've tidied up. Where's the
telegram? Where have you thrown it? Be so good as to look for it.
It's from Kazan, dated yesterday."

The maid--a pale, very slim girl with an indifferent expression
--found several telegrams in the basket under the table, and handed
them to the doctor without a word; but all these were telegrams
from patients. Then they looked in the drawing-room, and in Olga
Dmitrievna's room.

It was past midnight. Nikolay Yevgrafitch knew his wife would not
be home very soon, not till five o'clock at least. He did not trust
her, and when she was long away he could not sleep, was worried,
and at the same time he despised his wife, and her bed, and her
looking-glass, and her boxes of sweets, and the hyacinths, and the
lilies of the valley which were sent her every day by some one or
other, and which diffused the sickly fragrance of a florist's shop
all over the house. On such nights he became petty, ill-humoured,
irritable, and he fancied now that it was very necessary for him
to have the telegram he had received the day before from his brother,
though it contained nothing but Christmas greetings.

On the table of his wife's room under the box of stationery he found
a telegram, and glanced at it casually. It was addressed to his
wife, care of his mother-in-law, from Monte Carlo, and signed Michel
. . . . The doctor did not understand one word of it, as it was in
some foreign language, apparently English.

"Who is this Michel? Why Monte Carlo? Why directed care of her
mother?"

During the seven years of his married life he had grown used to
being suspicious, guessing, catching at clues, and it had several
times occurred to him, that his exercise at home had qualified him
to become an excellent detective. Going into his study and beginning
to reflect, he recalled at once how he had been with his wife in
Petersburg a year and a half ago, and had lunched with an old
school-fellow, a civil engineer, and how that engineer had introduced
to him and his wife a young man of