se.

"Well--we had a nice room with a good light, and there happened to be
nobody else in for the night. It was dry and clean and well
furnished--rather hard beds, I believe, though I scarcely noticed them. We
smoked and talked some time and then I went to sleep. Oh, yes--I passed a
very pleasant evening, and a comfortable night."

"But I thought--" Vjera hesitated, as though fearing that she was going to
say something foolish. "I thought that prisoners always had chains," she
said, at last.

Everybody laughed loudly at this remark and the poor girl felt very much
ashamed of herself, though the question had seemed so natural and had been
in her mind a long time. It was an immense relief, however, to know that
things had not been so bad as she had imagined, and Dumnoff's description
of the place of his confinement was certainly reassuring.

As the endless day wore on, she began to glance anxiously towards the
door, straining her ears for a familiar footstep in the outer shop. As has
been said, the Count sometimes looked in on Wednesdays, when his
calculations had convinced him that his friends, not having arrived by one
train, could not be expected for several hours. But to-day he did not
come, to-day when Vjera would have given heaven and earth for a sight of
him. Never, in her short life, had she realised how slowly the hours could
limp along from sunrise to noon, from noon to sunset, never had the little
spot of sunlight which appeared in the back-shop on fine afternoons taken
so long to crawl its diagonal course from the left front-leg of Dumnoff's
table, where it made its appearance, to the right-hand corner of her own,
at which point it suddenly went out and was seen no more, being probably
intercepted by some fixed object outside.

Time is the measure of most unhapppiness, for it is in sorrow and anxiety
that we are most keenly conscious of it, and are oppressed by its leaden
weight. When we are absorbed in work, in study, in the production of
anything upon which all our faculties are concentrated, we say that the
time passes quickly. When we are happy we know nothing of time nor of its
movement, only, long afterwards, we look back, and we say, "How short the
hours seemed then!"

Vjera toiled on and on, watching the creeping sunshine on the floor,
glancing at the ever-increasing heap of cut leaves that fell from the
Cossack's cutting-block, noting the slow rise in the pile of paper shells
before her and comp