AN UNHAPPY GIRL
Yes, yes, began Piotr Gavrilovitch; those were painful days . . . and I would rather not recall them. . . . But I have made you a promise; I shall have to tell you the whole story. Listen.
I
I was living at that time (the winter of 1835) in Moscow, in the house of my aunt, the sister of my dead mother. I was eighteen; I had only just passed from the second into the third course in the faculty 'of Language' (that was what it was called in those days) in the Moscow University. My aunt was a gentle, quiet woman—a widow. She lived in a big, wooden house in Ostozhonka, one of those warm, cosy houses such as, I fancy, one can find nowhere else but in Moscow. She saw hardly any one, sat from morning till night in the drawing-room with two companions, drank the choicest tea,
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