a...."

"Only one word, only one word!" she weeps, stretching out her hands to
me.

"What am I to do?"

"You are a queer girl, really..." I mutter. "I don't understand it! So
sensible, and all at once crying your eyes out...."

A silence follows. Katya straightens her hair, puts on her hat, then
crumples up the letters and stuffs them in her bag--and all this
deliberately, in silence. Her face, her bosom, and her gloves are wet
with tears, but her expression now is cold and forbidding.... I look at
her, and feel ashamed that I am happier than she. The absence of what
my philosophic colleagues call a general idea I have detected in myself
only just before death, in the decline of my days, while the soul of
this poor girl has known and will know no refuge all her life, all her
life!

"Let us have lunch, Katya," I say.

"No, thank you," she answers coldly. Another minute passes in silence.
"I don't like Harkov," I say; "it's so grey here--such a grey town."

"Yes, perhaps.... It's ugly. I am here not for long, passing through. I
am going on today."

"Where?"

"To the Crimea... that is, to the Caucasus."

"Oh! For long?"

"I don't know."

Katya gets up, and, with a cold smile, holds out her hand without
looking at me.

I want to ask her, "Then, you won't be at my funeral?" but she does not
look at me; her hand is cold and, as it were, strange. I escort her to
the door in silence. She goes out, walks down the long corridor without
looking back; she knows that I am looking after her, and most likely she
will look back at the turn.

No, she did not look back. I've seen her black dress for the last time:
her steps have died away. Farewell, my treasure!

THE PRIVY COUNCILLOR

AT the beginning of April in 1870 my mother, Klavdia Arhipovna,
the widow of a lieutenant, received from her brother Ivan, a privy
councillor in Petersburg, a letter in which, among other things, this
passage occurred: "My liver trouble forces me to spend every summer
abroad, and as I have not at the moment the money in hand for a trip
to Marienbad, it is very possible, dear sister, that I may spend this
summer with you at Kotchuevko...."

On reading the letter my mother turned pale and began trembling all
over; then an expression of mingled tears and laughter came into her
face. She began crying and laughing. This conflict of tears and laughter
always reminds me of the flickering and spluttering of a brightly
burning candle