is mother worse?"

He was alarmed and sent for a sledge.

When they got home, Nina Fyodorovna was sitting propped up with
pillows, with a candle in her hand. Her face looked dark and her
eyes were closed. Crowding in the doorway stood the nurse, the cook,
the housemaid, a peasant called Prokofy and a few persons of the
humbler class, who were complete strangers. The nurse was giving
them orders in a whisper, and they did not understand. Inside the
room at the window stood Lida, with a pale and sleepy face, gazing
severely at her mother.

Panaurov took the candle out of Nina Fyodorovna's hand, and, frowning
contemptuously, flung it on the chest of drawers.

"This is awful!" he said, and his shoulders quivered. "Nina, you
must lie down," he said affectionately. "Lie down, dear."

She looked at him, but did not know him. They laid her down on her
back.

When the priest and the doctor, Sergey Borisovitch, arrived, the
servants crossed themselves devoutly and prayed for her.

"What a sad business!" said the doctor thoughtfully, coming out
into the drawing-room. "Why, she was still young--not yet forty."

They heard the loud sobbing of the little girls. Panaurov, with a
pale face and moist eyes, went up to the doctor and said in a faint,
weak voice:

"Do me a favour, my dear fellow. Send a telegram to Moscow. I'm not
equal to it."

The doctor fetched the ink and wrote the following telegram to his
daughter:

"Madame Panaurov died at eight o'clock this evening. Tell your
husband: a mortgaged house for sale in Dvoryansky Street, nine
thousand cash. Auction on twelfth. Advise him not miss opportunity."

IX

Laptev lived in one of the turnings out of Little Dmitrovka. Besides
the big house facing the street, he rented also a two-storey lodge
in the yard at the back of his friend Kotchevoy, a lawyer's assistant
whom all the Laptevs called Kostya, because he had grown up under
their eyes. Facing this lodge stood another, also of two storeys,
inhabited by a French family consisting of a husband and wife and
five daughters.

There was a frost of twenty degrees. The windows were frozen over.
Waking up in the morning, Kostya, with an anxious face, took twenty
drops of a medicine; then, taking two dumb-bells out of the bookcase,
he did gymnastic exercises. He was tall and thin, with big reddish
moustaches; but what was most noticeable in his appearance was the
length of his legs.

Pyotr, a middle-aged peasant in a