and
threw up his hands, she ceased. And they spent a fortnight together
without speaking or looking at one another till the day she went away.
Before she went away she asked her father to come for a walk on the bank
of the river. Painful as it was for him to walk in the light of day, in
the sight of all honest people, with a daughter who was an actress, he
yielded to her request.

"What a lovely place you live in!" she said enthusiastically. "What
ravines and marshes! Good heavens, how lovely my native place is!"

And she had burst into tears.

"The place is simply taking up room,..." Andrey Andreyvitch
had thought, looking blankly at the ravines, not understanding his
daughter's enthusiasm. "There is no more profit from them than milk from
a billy-goat."

And she had cried and cried, drawing her breath greedily with her whole
chest, as though she felt she had not a long time left to breathe.

Andrey Andreyitch shook his head like a horse that has been bitten, and
to stifle painful memories began rapidly crossing himself....

"Be mindful, O Lord," he muttered, "of Thy departed servant, the harlot
Mariya, and forgive her sins, voluntary or involuntary...."

The unseemly word dropped from his lips again, but he did not notice
it: what is firmly imbedded in the consciousness cannot be driven out by
Father Grigory's exhortations or even knocked out by a nail. Makaryevna
sighed and whispered something, drawing in a deep breath, while
one-armed Mitka was brooding over something....

"Where there is no sickness, nor grief, nor sighing," droned the
sacristan, covering his right cheek with his hand.

Bluish smoke coiled up from the censer and bathed in the broad, slanting
patch of sunshine which cut across the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the
church. And it seemed as though the soul of the dead woman were soaring
into the sunlight together with the smoke. The coils of smoke like a
child's curls eddied round and round, floating upwards to the window
and, as it were, holding aloof from the woes and tribulations of which
that poor soul was full.

IN THE COACH-HOUSE

IT was between nine and ten o'clock in the evening. Stepan the coachman,
Mihailo the house-porter, Alyoshka the coachman's grandson, who had come
up from the village to stay with his grandfather, and Nikandr, an old
man of seventy, who used to come into the yard every evening to sell
salt herrings, were sitting round a lantern in the big coach-house,