e and
drank and coarsely flattered her father, whom they did not like.
The boys had the good-fortune to go to school, while Nina was left
practically uneducated. All her life she wrote an illegible scrawl,
and had read nothing but historical novels. Seventeen years ago,
when she was twenty-two, on a summer holiday at Himki, she made the
acquaintance of her present husband, a landowner called Panaurov,
had fallen in love with him, and married him secretly against her
father's will. Panaurov, a handsome, rather impudent fellow, who
whistled and lighted his cigarette from the holy lamp, struck the
father as an absolutely worthless person. And when the son-in-law
began in his letters demanding a dowry, the old man wrote to his
daughter that he would send her furs, silver, and various articles
that had been left at her mother's death, as well as thirty thousand
roubles, but without his paternal blessing. Later he sent another
twenty thousand. This money, as well as the dowry, was spent; the
estate had been sold and Panaurov moved with his family to the town
and got a job in a provincial government office. In the town he
formed another tie, and had a second family, and this was the subject
of much talk, as his illicit family was not a secret.

Nina Fyodorovna adored her husband. And now, listening to the
historical novel, she was thinking how much she had gone through
in her life, how much she had suffered, and that if any one were
to describe her life it would make a very pathetic story. As the
tumour was in her breast, she was persuaded that love and her
domestic grief were the cause of her illness, and that jealousy and
tears had brought her to her hopeless state.

At last Alexey Fyodorovitch closed the book and said:

"That's the end, and thank God for it. To-morrow we'll begin a new
one."

Nina Fyodorovna laughed. She had always been given to laughter, but
of late Laptev had begun to notice that at moments her mind seemed
weakened by illness, and she would laugh at the smallest trifle,
and even without any cause at all.

"Yulia came before dinner while you were out," she said. "So far
as I can see, she hasn't much faith in her papa. 'Let papa go on
treating you,' she said, 'but write in secret to the holy elder to
pray for you, too.' There is a holy man somewhere here. Yulia forgot
her parasol here; you must take it to her to-morrow," she went on
after a brief pause. "No, when the end comes, neither doctors nor
h