had committed. In the following letters, praying his
daughter to hasten her coming, because he was dangerously ill, and the
doctors thought could not last long, he filled her with astonishment
by expressing his intention to make a new will, and his determination
to separate his youngest daughter "from such a mother," and by his
prayers to her and her husband not to refuse to take upon themselves
little Olga's education.

"What had happened? How could that light-minded woman have so deeply
wounded my father?" Anna asked in bewilderment.

"If she was merely light-minded!" her husband answered, shrugging his
shoulders. "But she is so malicious, so crafty, and so daring that
anything may be expected from her."

"But in that case there would be an open scandal. We would know
something for certain. Nowadays they even relate such stories in the
newspapers, and my father is so well known, so noteworthy!"

"That is just why they don't write about him!" answered Borisoff, her
husband, smiling. He himself flatly refused to go to St. Petersburg.
With horror he remembered the first year of his marriage, before he
had succeeded in obtaining a transfer to another city, and was
compelled to meet the woman he detested; compelled also to meet his
father-in-law, a wise and honorable old man, who had fallen so
completely into the toils of this crafty woman. Anna Iurievna knew
that her husband despised her stepmother; that he detested her as the
cause of all the grief which they had had to endure through her, and
most of all, on account of the injustice she was guilty of toward her
brother, the general's son.

For six years Borisoff had lived with young Peter Nazimoff, as his
tutor and teacher, and loved him sincerely. The boy had already
reached the highest class at school, when his sister, two years older
than he, finished her schooling, and returned to her father's house,
about the time of the general's second marriage. What the young tutor
tried not to notice and to endure, for love of his pupil, in the first
year of the general's second marriage, became intolerable when the
general's daughter returned home, and to all the burden of his
difficult position was added the knowledge of their mutual love. He
proceeded frankly, and the whole matter was soon settled. But the
young man had never uttered a syllable as to the cause of Madame
Nazimoff's hatred for him. For the sake of his father-in-law's peace
of mind, he sincerely hoped th