and, maybe, hearing what we are saying," concluded Natálya Sávishna.
And, lowering her head, she grew silent. She needed a handkerchief to wipe off her falling tears. She rose, looked straight into my face, and said in a voice quivering with emotion:
"The Lord has moved me up several steps by this experience. What is left for me here? For whom am I to live, whom am I to love?"
“Do you not love us?” I said, with reproach, and with difficulty restraining my tears.
"God knows how I love you, my little doves, but I have never loved, nor can love, any one as I have loved her."
She could not speak any longer, turned away from me, and sobbed out loud.
I did not think of sleeping after that. We sat silent, facing each other, and wept.
Fóka entered the room. Noticing our condition, and evidently not wishing to disturb us, be looked about silently and timidly, and stopped at the door.
"What is it, Fókasha?" asked Natálya Sávishna, wiping her tears with her handkerchief.
"A pound and a half of raisins, four pounds of sugar, and three pounds of rice for the kutyá."[1]
"Right away, right away, my friend," said Natálya Sávishna. She hurriedly took a pinch of snuff, and with rapid steps went to one of the coffers. The last traces of the sorrow which had been produced by our conversation disappeared the moment she had a duty to perform which she regarded as very important.
"Why four pounds?" she grumbled, as she fetched the sugar and weighed it out on the steelyard. "Three pounds and a half will be enough."
- ↑ Rice-cake used in the church during the reading of the mass for the dead.
