is it to do
with you? They all keep repeating it at me: illness! illness!
illness! . . . As though I need your sympathy! Besides, where have
you picked up the notion that I am ill? I was ill before the
examinations, that's true, but now I have completely recovered,
there is nothing left of it but weakness."

"You have regained your health, well, thank God," said the scripture
teacher, Father Nikolay, a young priest in a foppish cinnamon-coloured
cassock and trousers outside his boots. "You ought to rejoice, but
you are irritable and so on."

"You are a nice one, too," Sysoev interrupted him. "Questions ought
to be straightforward, clear, but you kept asking riddles. That's
not the thing to do!"

By combined efforts they succeeded in soothing him and making him
sit down to the table. He was a long time making up his mind what
to drink, and pulling a wry face drank a wine-glass of some green
liqueur; then he drew a bit of pie towards him, and sulkily picked
out of the inside an egg with onion on it. At the first mouthful
it seemed to him that there was no salt in it. He sprinkled salt
on it and at once pushed it away as the pie was too salt.

At dinner Sysoev was seated between the inspector and Bruni. After
the first course the toasts began, according to the old-established
custom.

"I consider it my agreeable duty," the inspector began, "to propose
a vote of thanks to the absent school wardens, Daniel Petrovitch
and . . . and . . . and . . ."

"And Ivan Petrovitch," Bruni prompted him.

"And Ivan Petrovitch Kulikin, who grudge no expense for the school,
and I propose to drink their health. . . ."

"For my part," said Bruni, jumping up as though he had been stung,
"I propose a toast to the health of the honoured inspector of
elementary schools, Pavel Gennadievitch Nadarov!"

Chairs were pushed back, faces beamed with smiles, and the usual
clinking of glasses began.

The third toast always fell to Sysoev. And on this occasion, too,
he got up and began to speak. Looking grave and clearing his throat,
he first of all announced that he had not the gift of eloquence and
that he was not prepared to make a speech. Further he said that
during the fourteen years that he had been schoolmaster there had
been many intrigues, many underhand attacks, and even secret reports
on him to the authorities, and that he knew his enemies and those
who had informed against him, and he would not mention their names,
"for fear of s