ll were silent. Sysoev raised his eyes to the German's rosy face.

"We know how to appreciate it," Bruni went on, dropping his voice.
"In response to your words I ought to tell you that . . . Fyodor
Lukitch's family will be provided for and that a sum of money was
placed in the bank a month ago for that object."

Sysoev looked enquiringly at the German, at his colleagues, as
though unable to understand why his family should be provided for
and not he himself. And at once on all the faces, in all the
motionless eyes bent upon him, he read not the sympathy, not the
commiseration which he could not endure, but something else, something
soft, tender, but at the same time intensely sinister, like a
terrible truth, something which in one instant turned him cold all
over and filled his soul with unutterable despair. With a pale,
distorted face he suddenly jumped up and clutched at his head. For
a quarter of a minute he stood like that, stared with horror at a
fixed point before him as though he saw the swiftly coming death
of which Bruni was speaking, then sat down and burst into tears.

"Come, come! . . . What is it?" he heard agitated voices saying.
"Water! drink a little water!"

A short time passed and the schoolmaster grew calmer, but the party
did not recover their previous liveliness. The dinner ended in
gloomy silence, and much earlier than on previous occasions.

When he got home Sysoev first of all looked at himself in the glass.

"Of course there was no need for me to blubber like that!" he
thought, looking at his sunken cheeks and his eyes with dark rings
under them. "My face is a much better colour to-day than yesterday.
I am suffering from anemia and catarrh of the stomach, and my cough
is only a stomach cough."

Reassured, he slowly began undressing, and spent a long time brushing
his new black suit, then carefully folded it up and put it in the
chest of drawers.

Then he went up to the table where there lay a pile of his pupils'
exercise-books, and picking out Babkin's, sat down and fell to
contemplating the beautiful childish handwriting. . . .

And meantime, while he was examining the exercise-books, the district
doctor was sitting in the next room and telling his wife in a whisper
that a man ought not to have been allowed to go out to dinner who
had not in all probability more than a week to live.

ENEMIES

BETWEEN nine and ten on a dark September evening the only son of
the district doctor,