ed:

"Catch!"

He caught it. With a loud laugh she threw him another sweet, then
a third, and he kept catching them and putting them into his mouth,
looking at her with imploring eyes; and it seemed to her that in
his face, his features, his expression, there was a great deal that
was feminine and childlike. And when, out of breath, she sat down
on the seat and looked at him, laughing, he tapped her cheek with
two fingers, and said as though he were vexed:

"Naughty girl!"

"Take it," she said, giving him the box. "I don't care for sweet
things."

He ate up the sweets--every one of them, and locked the empty box
in his trunk; he liked boxes with pictures on them.

"That's mischief enough, though," he said. "It's time for the veteran
to go bye-bye."

He took out of his hold-all a Bokhara dressing-gown and a pillow,
lay down, and covered himself with the dressing-gown.

"Good-night, darling!" he said softly, and sighed as though his
whole body ached.

And soon a snore was heard. Without the slightest feeling of
constraint, she, too, lay down and went to sleep.

When next morning she drove through her native town from the station
homewards, the streets seemed to her empty and deserted. The snow
looked grey, and the houses small, as though some one had squashed
them. She was met by a funeral procession: the dead body was carried
in an open coffin with banners.

"Meeting a funeral, they say, is lucky," she thought.

There were white bills pasted in the windows of the house where
Nina Fyodorovna used to live.

With a sinking at her heart she drove into her own courtyard and
rang at the door. It was opened by a servant she did not know--a
plump, sleepy-looking girl wearing a warm wadded jacket. As she
went upstairs Yulia remembered how Laptev had declared his love
there, but now the staircase was unscrubbed, covered with foot-marks.
Upstairs in the cold passage patients were waiting in their out-door
coats. And for some reason her heart beat violently, and she was
so excited she could scarcely walk.

The doctor, who had grown even stouter, was sitting with a brick-red
face and dishevelled hair, drinking tea. Seeing his daughter, he
was greatly delighted, and even lacrymose. She thought that she was
the only joy in this old man's life, and much moved, she embraced
him warmly, and told him she would stay a long time--till Easter.
After taking off her things in her own room, she went back to the
dining-room t