milk, fresh eggs, and the
best of butter.

"You'll kill them with kindness," Tina often remonstrated. "They are too
fat by half now."

"They can't be too fat," Ivan would reply. "No one is too fat. I love to
see rosy cheeks and stout limbs. Wait till you're in the country! Then
you may talk about putting on flesh. The air there will fatten you even
more than the food."

"Then we shall burst, and there will be an end of us," Tina would
laughingly say.

But despite all this, despite the way in which he fondled and caressed
them, the children involuntarily shrank away from Ivan; and on Tina
angrily demanding the reason, they told her they could not help
it--there was something in his bright eyes and touch that frightened
them. When Tina's brothers and sisters heard of this, they upheld the
children.

"We are not in the least surprised," they said; "his eyes are cruel--so
are his lips; and as for his eyebrows--those dark, straight eyebrows
that meet in a point over the nose--why, every one knows what a bad sign
that is!"

But Tina grew so angry they had to desist. "You are jealous," she said
to her brothers. "You envy him his looks and money." And to her sisters
she said, "You only wish you could have had him yourselves. You know I
love him already far more than I ever loved Rupert." (Rupert was her
first husband.)

And within a month or so of the marriage Tina left all her relatives in
Moscow, and, accompanied by her children and dogs--some people hinted
that Tina was fonder of her dogs than of her children--went with Ivan
Baranoff to his ancestral home near Orsk.

Though accustomed to the cold, Tina found the climate of Orsk almost
more than she could bear. Her husband's house, which occupied an
extremely solitary position on the confines of a gloomy forest, some few
miles from the town, was a large, grey stone building full of dark
winding passages and dungeon-like rooms. The furniture was scant, and
the rooms, with the exception of those devoted to herself, her husband
and the children, which were covered with crimson drugget, were
carpetless. A more barren, inhospitable looking house could not be
imagined, and the moment Tina entered it, her spirits sank to zero. The
atmosphere of the place frightened her the most. It was not that it was
merely forlorn and cheerless, but there was a something in it that
reminded her of the smell of the animal houses in the Zoological Gardens
in Moscow, and a something she c