nd his pipe-smoke
together flavored that cheery room. Sosha had no hesitation in taking
Piotr's lead, and begging the master either to bring home company to
amuse him, or to change his abode to some more fashionable quarter of
the city, whither all his dependants would happily follow him.

To these simple appeals Ivan listened, certainly; but, bound down by
that cruel lassitude which is the direst symptom of chronic melancholy,
he refused every suggestion, and left his servants to return to their
quarters, dismally shaking their gray heads over his mental state.

So through the winter. But the flowing of spring-tide rouses the dullest
to contemplate some possible change of routine. And when that blessed
season once more breathed upon White Russia, Ivan woke to the memory of
old desire. From his mother, who, as a girl, had run wild over the huge
Blashkov estates, Ivan inherited that intense love of nature without
which an artist must be always maimed. This year, especially, he found
himself daily dreaming of the perfumed nights and sweet-aired days of
the country of his boyhood: his mother's favorite resort, at Klin,
whither she had been wont to convey him in May, and whence she departed,
tearfully, under heavy pressure, in October; though twice in her life
she had managed to spend the greater part of the winter there, in the
white wilderness hateful to her lord. "Maidonovo" was a moderate-sized
house, set in the midst of twenty acres of land situated a half-mile
from the extremity of the village of Klin. A year after his wife's death
Michael Gregoriev had sold the place, which he had always detested. Of
it Ivan now dreamed, incessantly; till, late in April, he entered into
negotiations that were presently to electrify his household and that
part of Moscow's population with whom he figured as something of a
personage.

It was the twenty-eighth of the month when Piotr, after a two-hour
closeting with his master, flew to his fellows with astounding news.

The great Gregoriev palace was, in less than a month, to pass out of
the hands of the last of the family, and into the possession of the
government, by whom it was to be turned over to the Department of
Police. Moreover--and Piotr's emphasis on the word brought a sharp
stillness in place of the rising buzz of comment--instead of a place in
Moscow, Monsieur le Prince had bought his mother's former country-house
at Klin, whither he intended to remove immediately, there t