ng to do with your affairs,"
remarked the prince.

"I have lain here now for three days," cried the young man without
noticing, "and I have seen a lot! Fancy! he suspects his daughter, that
angel, that orphan, my cousin--he suspects her, and every evening he
searches her room, to see if she has a lover hidden in it! He comes
here too on tiptoe, creeping softly--oh, so softly--and looks under the
sofa--my bed, you know. He is mad with suspicion, and sees a thief in
every corner. He runs about all night long; he was up at least seven
times last night, to satisfy himself that the windows and doors were
barred, and to peep into the oven. That man who appears in court for
scoundrels, rushes in here in the night and prays, lying prostrate,
banging his head on the ground by the half-hour--and for whom do you
think he prays? Who are the sinners figuring in his drunken petitions?
I have heard him with my own ears praying for the repose of the soul
of the Countess du Barry! Colia heard it too. He is as mad as a March
hare!"

"You hear how he slanders me, prince," said Lebedeff, almost beside
himself with rage. "I may be a drunkard, an evil-doer, a thief, but at
least I can say one thing for myself. He does not know--how should he,
mocker that he is?--that when he came into the world it was I who washed
him, and dressed him in his swathing-bands, for my sister Anisia had
lost her husband, and was in great poverty. I was very little better
off than she, but I sat up night after night with her, and nursed both
mother and child; I used to go downstairs and steal wood for them from
the house-porter. How often did I sing him to sleep when I was half dead
with hunger! In short, I was more than a father to him, and now--now he
jeers at me! Even if I did cross myself, and pray for the repose of the
soul of the Comtesse du Barry, what does it matter? Three days ago,
for the first time in my life, I read her biography in an historical
dictionary. Do you know who she was? You there!" addressing his nephew.
"Speak! do you know?"

"Of course no one knows anything about her but you," muttered the young
man in a would-be jeering tone.

"She was a Countess who rose from shame to reign like a Queen. An
Empress wrote to her, with her own hand, as 'Ma chere cousine.' At
a lever-du-roi one morning (do you know what a lever-du-roi was?)--a
Cardinal, a Papal legate, offered to put on her stockings; a high and
holy person like that looked on it as