itine's house had, as it were, grown young again.
Its freshly-painted walls shone with a welcome whiteness, while the
panes of its open windows flashed ruddy to the setting sun. Out of
these windows there flowed into the street mirthful sounds of ringing
youthful voices, of never-ceasing laughter. All the house seemed
teeming with life and overflowing with irrepressible merriment. As for
the former mistress of the house, she had been laid in the grave long
ago. Maria Dmitrievna died two years after Liza took the veil. Nor did
Marfa Timofeevna long survive her niece; they rest side by side in
the cemetery of the town. Nastasia Carpovna also was no longer alive.
During the course of several years the faithful old lady used to go
every day to pray at her friend's grave. Then her time came, and her
bones also were laid in the mould.

But Maria Dmitrievna's house did not pass into the hands of strangers,
did not go out of her family--the nest was not torn to pieces.
Lenochka, who had grown into a pretty and graceful girl; her
betrothed, a flaxen locked officer of hussars; Maria Dmitrievna's son,
who had only recently married at St. Petersburg, and had now arrived
with his young bride to spend the spring in O.; his wife's sister, a
sixteen-year-old Institute-girl, with clear eyes and rosy cheeks; and
Shurochka, who had also grown up and turned out pretty--these were the
young people who made the walls of the Kalitine house resound with
laughter and with talk. Every thing was altered in the house, every
thing had been made to harmonize with its new inhabitants. Beardless
young servant-lads, full of fun and laughter, had replaced the grave
old domestics of former days. A couple of setters tore wildly about
and jumped upon the couches, in the rooms up and down which Roska,
after it had grown fat, used to waddle seriously. In the stable many
horses were stalled--clean-limbed canterers, smart trotters for the
centre of the _troika_, fiery gallopers with platted manes for the
side places, riding horses from the Don. The hours for breakfast,
dinner, and supper, were all mixed up and confounded together. In the
words of neighbors, "Such a state of things as never had been known
before" had taken place.

On the evening of which we are about to speak, the inmates of the
Kalitine house, of whom the eldest, Lenochka's betrothed, was not more
than four-and-twenty, had taken to playing a game which was not of a
very complicated nature, b