been for the stuffiness and the close smell of rye bread, fennel,
and brushwood, which prevented her from breathing freely, it would
have been delightful to hide from her visitors here under the
thatched roof in the dusk, and to think about the little creature.
It was cosy and quiet.

"What a pretty spot!" said a feminine voice. "Let us sit here, Pyotr
Dmitritch."

Olga Mihalovna began peeping through a crack between two branches.
She saw her husband, Pyotr Dmitritch, and Lubotchka Sheller, a girl
of seventeen who had not long left boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitritch,
with his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from
having drunk so much at dinner, slouched by the hurdle and raked
the hay into a heap with his foot; Lubotchka, pink with the heat
and pretty as ever, stood with her hands behind her, watching the
lazy movements of his big handsome person.

Olga Mihalovna knew that her husband was attractive to women, and
did not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of the way
in Pyotr Dmitritch's lazily raking together the hay in order to sit
down on it with Lubotchka and chatter to her of trivialities; there
was nothing out of the way, either, in pretty Lubotchka's looking
at him with her soft eyes; but yet Olga Mihalovna felt vexed with
her husband and frightened and pleased that she could listen to
them.

"Sit down, enchantress," said Pyotr Dmitritch, sinking down on the
hay and stretching. "That's right. Come, tell me something."

"What next! If I begin telling you anything you will go to sleep."

"Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like
yours are watching me?"

In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with
his hat on the back of his head in the presence of a lady, there
was nothing out of the way either. He was spoilt by women, knew
that they found him attractive, and had adopted with them a special
tone which every one said suited him. With Lubotchka he behaved as
with all women. But, all the same, Olga Mihalovna was jealous.

"Tell me, please," said Lubotchka, after a brief silence--"is it
true that you are to be tried for something?"

"I? Yes, I am . . . numbered among the transgressors, my charmer."

"But what for?"

"For nothing, but just . . . it's chiefly a question of politics,"
yawned Pyotr Dmitritch--"the antagonisms of Left and Right. I,
an obscurantist and reactionary, ventured in an official paper to
make use of an expression