prayed all at once.

"It's a-all right," said Sasha, smiling. "It's a-all right."

VI

Autumn had passed and winter, too, had gone. Nadya had begun to be
very homesick and thought every day of her mother and her grandmother;
she thought of Sasha too. The letters that came from home were kind
and gentle, and it seemed as though everything by now were forgiven
and forgotten. In May after the examinations she set off for home
in good health and high spirits, and stopped on the way at Moscow
to see Sasha. He was just the same as the year before, with the
same beard and unkempt hair, with the same large beautiful eyes,
and he still wore the same coat and canvas trousers; but he looked
unwell and worried, he seemed both older and thinner, and kept
coughing, and for some reason he struck Nadya as grey and provincial.

"My God, Nadya has come!" he said, and laughed gaily. "My darling
girl!"

They sat in the printing room, which was full of tobacco smoke, and
smelt strongly, stiflingly of Indian ink and paint; then they went
to his room, which also smelt of tobacco and was full of the traces
of spitting; near a cold samovar stood a broken plate with dark
paper on it, and there were masses of dead flies on the table and
on the floor. And everything showed that Sasha ordered his personal
life in a slovenly way and lived anyhow, with utter contempt for
comfort, and if anyone began talking to him of his personal happiness,
of his personal life, of affection for him, he would not have
understood and would have only laughed.

"It is all right, everything has gone well," said Nadya hurriedly.
"Mother came to see me in Petersburg in the autumn; she said that
Granny is not angry, and only keeps going into my room and making
the sign of the cross over the walls."

Sasha looked cheerful, but he kept coughing, and talked in a cracked
voice, and Nadya kept looking at him, unable to decide whether he
really were seriously ill or whether it were only her fancy.

"Dear Sasha," she said, "you are ill."

"No, it's nothing, I am ill, but not very . . ."

"Oh, dear!" cried Nadya, in agitation. "Why don't you go to a doctor?
Why don't you take care of your health? My dear, darling Sasha,"
she said, and tears gushed from her eyes and for some reason there
rose before her imagination Andrey Andreitch and the naked lady
with the vase, and all her past which seemed now as far away as her
childhood; and she began crying because Sasha no long