to her the height of human happiness.  She once announced that she could not wish her daughter a happier fate.  It may, however, be expected that destiny will save Mademoiselle Ada from that kind of happiness.  From being a chubby, rosy child, she has changed into a pale, weak-chested girl, and her nerves are already unstrung.  The number of Varvara Pavlovna’s admirers has diminished, but they have not disappeared.  Some of them she will, in all probability, retain to the end of her days.  The most ardent of them in recent times has been a certain Zakurdalo-Skubyrnikof, a retired officer of the guard, a man of about thirty-eight years of age, wearing long mustaches, and possessing a singularly vigorous frame.  The Frenchmen who frequent Madame Lavretsky’s drawing-room call him le gros taureau de l’Ukraine.  Varvara Pavlovna never invites him to her fashionable parties, but he is in full possession of her good graces.

And so—­eight years had passed away.  Again spring shone from heaven in radiant happiness.  Again it smiled on earth and on man.  Again, beneath its caress, all things began to love, to flower, to sing.

The town of O. had changed but little in the course of these eight years, but Madame Kalitine’s house had, as it were, grown young again.  Its freshly-painted walls shone with a welcome whiteness, while the panes of its open windows flashed ruddy to the setting sun.  Out of these windows there flowed into the street mirthful sounds of ringing youthful voices, of never-ceasing laughter.  All the house seemed teeming with life and overflowing with irrepressible merriment.  As for the former mistress of the house, she had been laid in the grave long ago.  Maria Dmitrievna died two years after Liza took the veil.  Nor did Marfa Timofeevna long survive her niece; they rest side by side in the cemetery of the town.  Nastasia Carpovna also was no longer alive.  During the course of several years the faithful old lady used to go every day to pray at her friend’s grave.  Then her time came, and her bones also were laid in the mould.

But Maria Dmitrievna’s house did not pass into the hands of strangers, did not go out of her family—­the nest was not torn to pieces.  Lenochka, who had grown into a pretty and graceful girl; her betrothed, a flaxen locked officer of hussars; Maria Dmitrievna’s son, who had only recently married at St. Petersburg, and had now arrived with his young bride to spend the spring in O.; his wife’s sister, a sixteen-year-old Institute-girl, with clear eyes and rosy cheeks; and Shurochka, who had also grown up and turned out pretty—­these were the young people who made the walls of the Kalitine house resound with laughter and with talk.  Every thing was altered in the house, every thing had been made to harmonize with its new inhabitants.  Beardless young servant-lads, full of fun and laughter, had replaced the grave old domestics of former days.  A couple of setters tore wildly about and jumped upon the couches,