tanding open, and pools left by the night's rain were drying on the
damp-blackened flags of the terrace. The open door was swinging on its
iron hinges in the wind, and all the paths looked wet and muddy. The old
birch trees with their naked white branches, the bushes, the turf,
the nettles, the currant-trees, the elders with the pale side of their
leaves turned upwards--all were dashing themselves about, and looking as
though they were trying to wrench themselves free from their roots. From
the avenue of lime-trees showers of round, yellow leaves were flying
through the air in tossing, eddying circles, and strewing the wet
road and soaked aftermath of the hayfield with a clammy carpet. At the
moment, my thoughts were wholly taken up with my father's approaching
marriage and with the point of view from which Woloda regarded it. The
future seemed to me to bode no good for any of us. I felt distressed to
think that a woman who was not only a stranger but young should be going
to associate with us in so many relations of life, without having any
right to do so--nay, that this young woman was going to usurp the place
of our dead mother. I felt depressed, and kept thinking more and more
that my father was to blame in the matter. Presently I heard his voice
and Woloda's speaking together in the pantry, and, not wishing to meet
Papa just then, had just left the room when I was pursued by Lubotshka,
who said that Papa wanted to see me.

He was standing in the drawing-room, with his hand resting on the piano,
and was gazing in my direction with an air at once grave and impatient.
His face no longer wore the youthful, gay expression which had struck me
for so long, but, on the contrary, looked sad. Woloda was walking about
the room with a pipe in his hand. I approached my father, and bade him
good morning.

"Well, my children," he said firmly, with a lift of his head and in
the peculiarly hurried manner of one who wishes to announce something
obviously unwelcome, but no longer admitting of reconsideration, "you
know, I suppose, that I am going to marry Avdotia Epifanov." He paused
a moment. "Hitherto I had had no desire for any one to succeed your
mother, but"--and again he paused--"it-it is evidently my fate.
Dunetchka is an excellent, kind girl, and no longer in her first youth.
I hope, therefore, my children, that you will like her, and she, I know,
will be sincerely fond of you, for she is a good woman. And now," he
went on,