game if we had had an encounter;
but now. . . . But what's the good of talking!"

Uzelkov was overcome with melancholy. He suddenly had a passionate
longing to weep, as once he had longed for love, and he felt those
tears would have tasted sweet and refreshing. A moisture came into
his eyes and there was a lump in his throat, but . . . Shapkin was
standing beside him and Uzelkov was ashamed to show weakness before
a witness. He turned back abruptly and went into the church.

Only two hours later, after talking to the churchwarden and looking
over the church, he seized a moment when Shapkin was in conversation
with the priest and hastened away to weep. . . . He stole up to the
grave secretly, furtively, looking round him every minute. The
little white slab looked at him pensively, mournfully, and innocently
as though a little girl lay under it instead of a dissolute, divorced
wife.

"To weep, to weep!" thought Uzelkov.

But the moment for tears had been missed; though the old man blinked
his eyes, though he worked up his feelings, the tears did not flow
nor the lump come in his throat. After standing for ten minutes,
with a gesture of despair, Uzelkov went to look for Shapkin.

DARKNESS

A YOUNG peasant, with white eyebrows and eyelashes and broad
cheekbones, in a torn sheepskin and big black felt overboots, waited
till the Zemstvo doctor had finished seeing his patients and came
out to go home from the hospital; then he went up to him, diffidently.

"Please, your honour," he said.

"What do you want?"

The young man passed the palm of his hand up and over his nose,
looked at the sky, and then answered:

"Please, your honour. . . . You've got my brother Vaska the blacksmith
from Varvarino in the convict ward here, your honour. . . ."

"Yes, what then?"

"I am Vaska's brother, you see. . . . Father has the two of us:
him, Vaska, and me, Kirila; besides us there are three sisters, and
Vaska's a married man with a little one. . . . There are a lot of
us and no one to work. . . . In the smithy it's nearly two years
now since the forge has been heated. I am at the cotton factory, I
can't do smith's work, and how can father work? Let alone work, he
can't eat properly, he can't lift the spoon to his mouth."

"What do you want from me?"

"Be merciful! Let Vaska go!"

The doctor looked wonderingly at Kirila, and without saying a word
walked on. The young peasant ran on in front and flung himself in
a heap