Liza did not say a word in reply—­she did not ever smile.  Slightly arching her eyebrows, and growing rather red, she kept her eyes fixed on the ground, but did not withdraw her hand.  Up stairs, in Marfa Timofeevna’s room, the light of the lamp, which hung in the corner before the age-embrowned sacred pictures, fell on Lavretsky, as he sat in an arm-chair, his elbows resting on his knees, his face hidden in his hands.  In front of him stood the old lady, who from time to time silently passed her hand over his hair.  He spent more than an hour with her after taking leave of the mistress of the house, he scarcely saying a word to his kind old friend, and she not asking him any questions.  And why should he have spoken? what could she have asked?  She understood all so well, she so fully sympathized with all the feelings which filled his heart.

VIII.

Fedor Ivanovich Lavretsky (we must ask our reader’s permission to break off the thread of the story for a time) sprang from a noble family of long descent.  The founder of the race migrated from Prussia during the reign of Basil the Blind,[A] and was favored with a grant of two hundred chetverts[B] of land in the district of Biejetsk.  Many of his descendants filled various official positions, and were appointed to governorships in distant places, under princes and influential personages, but none of them obtained any great amount of property, or arrived at a higher dignity, than that of inspector of the Czar’s table.

[Footnote A:  In the fifteenth century.]

[Footnote B:  An old measure of land, variously estimated at from two to six acres.]

The richest and most influential of all the Lavretskys was Fedor Ivanovich’s paternal great-grandfather Andrei, a man who was harsh, insolent, shrewd, and crafty.  Even up to the present day men have never ceased to talk about his despotic manners, his furious temper, his senseless prodigality, and his insatiable avarice.  He was very tall and stout, his complexion was swarthy, and he wore no beard.  He lisped, and he generally seemed half asleep.  But the more quietly he spoke, the more did all around him tremble.  He had found a wife not unlike himself.  She had a round face, a yellow complexion, prominent eyes, and the nose of a hawk.  A gypsy by descent, passionate and vindictive in temper, she refused to yield in any thing to her husband, who all but brought her to her grave, and whom, although she had been eternally squabbling with him, she could net bear long to survive.

Andrei’s son, Peter, our Fedor’s grandfather, did not take after his father.  He was a simple country gentleman; rather odd, noisy in voice and slow in action, rough but not malicious, hospitable, and devoted to coursing.  He was more than thirty years old when he inherited from his father two thousand souls,[A] all in excellent condition; but he soon began to squander his property, a part of which he