oman's face was not
melting; it was queer that the face itself looked somehow drawn, and had
turned a pale gray, dingy waxen hue and had grown grave and solemn.

"You are a fool!" muttered the turner.... "I tell you on my
conscience, before God,... and you go and... Well, you are a fool!
I have a good mind not to take you to Pavel Ivanitch!"

The turner let the reins go and began thinking. He could not bring
himself to look round at his old woman: he was frightened. He was
afraid, too, of asking her a question and not getting an answer. At
last, to make an end of uncertainty, without looking round he felt his
old woman's cold hand. The lifted hand fell like a log.

"She is dead, then! What a business!"

And the turner cried. He was not so much sorry as annoyed. He thought
how quickly everything passes in this world! His trouble had hardly
begun when the final catastrophe had happened. He had not had time to
live with his old woman, to show her he was sorry for her before she
died. He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had
passed by as it were in a fog. What with drunkenness, quarreling, and
poverty, there had been no feeling of life. And, as though to spite him,
his old woman died at the very time when he felt he was sorry for her,
that he could not live without her, and that he had behaved dreadfully
badly to her.

"Why, she used to go the round of the village," he remembered. "I sent
her out myself to beg for bread. What a business! She ought to have
lived another ten years, the silly thing; as it is I'll be bound she
thinks I really was that sort of man.... Holy Mother! but where the
devil am I driving? There's no need for a doctor now, but a burial. Turn
back!"

Grigory turned back and lashed the horse with all his might. The road
grew worse and worse every hour. Now he could not see the yoke at
all. Now and then the sledge ran into a young fir tree, a dark object
scratched the turner's hands and flashed before his eyes, and the field
of vision was white and whirling again.

"To live over again," thought the turner.

He remembered that forty years ago Matryona had been young, handsome,
merry, that she had come of a well-to-do family. They had married her
to him because they had been attracted by his handicraft. All the
essentials for a happy life had been there, but the trouble was that,
just as he had got drunk after the wedding and lay sprawling on the
stove, so he had gone on with