window; the sensitive air trembled
resonantly; the pale, little room seemed a sanctuary, and the head of the
old man rose high and inspired in the silvery semi-darkness. Lavretzky
approached and embraced him. At first, Lemm did not respond to his
embrace, he even repulsed it with his elbow; for a long time, without
moving a single limb, he continued to gaze forth, as before, sternly,
almost roughly, and only bellowed a couple of times: "Aha!" At last his
transfigured face grew calm, relaxed, and, in reply to Lavretzky's warm
congratulations, he first smiled a little, then fell to weeping, feebly
sobbing like a child.

"This is marvellous,"--he said:--"that precisely you should now have
come; but I know--I know all."

"You know all?"--ejaculated Lavretzky, in confusion.

"You have heard me,"--returned Lemm:--"have not you understood that I
know all?"

Lavretzky could not get to sleep until the morning: all night long, he
sat on his bed. And Liza did not sleep: she prayed.

XXXV

The reader knows how Lavretzky had grown up and developed; let us say a
few words about Liza's bringing up. She was ten years old when her father
died; but he had paid little heed to her. Overwhelmed with business,
constantly absorbed in increasing his property, splenetic, harsh,
impatient, he furnished money unsparingly for teachers, tutors, clothing,
and the other wants of the children; but he could not endure, as he
expressed it, "to dandle the squalling brats,"--and he had no time to
dandle them: he worked, toiled over his business, slept little,
occasionally played cards, worked again; he compared himself to a horse
harnessed to a threshing-machine. "My life has rushed by fast," he said
on his deathbed, with a proud smile on his parched lips. Marya
Dmitrievna, in reality, troubled herself about Liza hardly more than did
the father, although she had boasted to Lavretzky that she alone had
reared her children; she had dressed Liza like a doll, in the presence of
visitors had patted her on the head, and called her, to her face, a
clever child and a darling--and that was all: any regular care wearied
the lazy gentlewoman. During her father's lifetime, Liza had been in the
hands of a governess, Mlle. Moreau, from Paris, and after his death she
had passed into the charge of Marfa Timofeevna. The reader is
acquainted with Marfa Timofeevna; but Mlle. Moreau was a tiny, wrinkled
creature, with birdlik