an in
comparatively placid surroundings.

"Kindly let me go home!" shouted the doctor, breathing hard.

Abogin rang the bell sharply. When no one came to answer the bell
he rang again and angrily flung the bell on the floor; it fell on
the carpet with a muffled sound, and uttered a plaintive note as
though at the point of death. A footman came in.

"Where have you been hiding yourself, the devil take you?" His
master flew at him, clenching his fists. "Where were you just now?
Go and tell them to bring the victoria round for this gentleman,
and order the closed carriage to be got ready for me. Stay," he
cried as the footman turned to go out. "I won't have a single traitor
in the house by to-morrow! Away with you all! I will engage fresh
servants! Reptiles!"

Abogin and the doctor remained in silence waiting for the carriage.
The first regained his expression of sleekness and his refined
elegance. He paced up and down the room, tossed his head elegantly,
and was evidently meditating on something. His anger had not cooled,
but he tried to appear not to notice his enemy. . . . The doctor
stood, leaning with one hand on the edge of the table, and looked
at Abogin with that profound and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt
only to be found in the eyes of sorrow and indigence when they are
confronted with well-nourished comfort and elegance.

When a little later the doctor got into the victoria and drove off
there was still a look of contempt in his eyes. It was dark, much
darker than it had been an hour before. The red half-moon had sunk
behind the hill and the clouds that had been guarding it lay in
dark patches near the stars. The carriage with red lamps rattled
along the road and soon overtook the doctor. It was Abogin driving
off to protest, to do absurd things. . . .

All the way home the doctor thought not of his wife, nor of his
Andrey, but of Abogin and the people in the house he had just left.
His thoughts were unjust and inhumanly cruel. He condemned Abogin
and his wife and Paptchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued
light among sweet perfumes, and all the way home he hated and
despised them till his head ached. And a firm conviction concerning
those people took shape in his mind.

Time will pass and Kirilov's sorrow will pass, but that conviction,
unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will
remain in the doctor's mind to the grave.

THE EXAMINING MAGISTRATE

A DISTRICT doctor and an