"Ah, let me alone, let me alone!" she said, and going back to her bedroom she sat down in the same place she had occupied when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands, her rings slipping down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over her recollections of the entire interview. "He has gone! But what has he finally arrived at with her?" she thought. "Can it be he sees her? Why didn't I ask him! No, no, reconciliation is impossible. Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers- strangers forever!" She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her. "And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!… How I loved him! And now don't I love him? Don't I love him more than before? The most horrible thing is," she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matriona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.

"Let us send for my brother," she said; "he can get a dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like yesterday."

"Very well, I will come directly and see about it. But did you send for some new milk?"

And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.

V

Stepan Arkadyevich had learned easily at school, thanks to his excellent abilities, but he had been idle and mischievous, and therefore was one of the lowest in his class. But in spite of his habitually dissipated mode of life, his inferior grade in the service, and his comparative youth, he occupied the honorable and lucrative position of president of one of the government boards at Moscow.