and meaningly. Baburin buttoned up his coat and went out.

When I was left alone with Musa, she looked at me with a somewhat changed glance, and observed in a voice which was also changed, and with no smile: "I don't know, Piotr Petrovitch, what you think of me now, but I dare say you remember what I used to be. . . . I was self-confident, light-hearted . . . and not good; I wanted to live for my own pleasure. But I want to tell you this: when I was abandoned, and was like one lost, and was only waiting for God to take me, or to pluck up spirit to make an end of myself,--once more, just as in Voronezh, I met with Paramon Semyonitch--and he saved me once again. . . . Not a word that could wound me did I hear from him, not a word of reproach; he asked nothing of me--I was not worthy of that; but he loved me . . . and I became his wife. What was I to do? I had failed of dying; and I could not live either after my own choice. . . . What was I to do with myself? Even so--it was a mercy to be thankful for. That is all."

She ceased, turned away for an instant . . . the same submissive smile came back to her lips. "Whether life's easy for me, you needn't ask," was the meaning I fancied now in that smile.

The conversation passed to ordinary subjects. Musa told me that Punin had left a cat that