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man, gave him food, brought tea, cleared the table in silence. Once she fell into trouble: Passing hurriedly through the room she lost one of the overshoes which she had on her feet: "Ah! may thou be!--they fall off every moment!" grumbled she, and for some minutes she struggled with that overshoe, which, dropping from her foot, slipped along the floor noisily. Kranitski raised his head: "What is that?" inquired he. She made no answer, but when she was near the kitchen door, he cried: "What have you on your feet that clatter so? It is irritating!" She stopped at the door: "What have I on my feet? Well, your old overshoes! Am I to wear out shoes every day, and then buy new ones? 'Irritating!' Arabian adventure! God grant that you never have worse irritation than overshoes clattering on the floor!" And she grumbled on in the kitchen while going with an empty glass to the samovar: "You wouldn't have a pinch of tea in the house if I went around in new shoes all my time!" Darkness came down. Kranitski smoked cigarettes one after another, and was so sunk in thought that he trembled throughout his body. When widow Clemens brought in a lamp, with a milk-colored globe, which filled the room with a white, mild light, Kranitski looked at the head of the old woman in the white lamp-light, and, for the first time in a number of hours, he spoke: "Come, mother, come nearer!" said he. When she came he seized her rude fist in both his hands and shook it vigorously. "What could I do; what would happen to me now, if you were not with me? No living soul of my own here! Alone, alone, as in a desert." The onrush of tenderness burst through all obstructions. Confidences flowed on. He had loved for the last time in life, le dernier amour, and all had ended. She had forbidden him to see her. That decision of hers had been ripening for a long time. Reproaches of conscience, shame, despair as to her children. One daughter knew everything; the other might know it any day. She had let out of her hands the rudder of those hearts and consciences, for when she was talking with them her own fault closed her lips, like a red-hot seal. She thought herself the most pitiful of creatures. She did not wish to make further use of her husband's wealth, or the position which it give her in society. She wished to go away, to settle down in some silent corner, vanish from the eyes of people. Kranitski was so excited that he al
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