“It’s high time you were well, dear colleague,” said Hobotov, yawning.  “I’ll be bound, you are sick of this bobbery.”

“And we shall recover,” said Mihail Averyanitch cheerfully.  “We shall live another hundred years!  To be sure!”

“Not a hundred years, but another twenty,” Hobotov said reassuringly.  “It’s all right, all right, colleague; don’t lose heart. . . .  Don’t go piling it on!”

“We’ll show what we can do,” laughed Mihail Averyanitch, and he slapped his friend on the knee.  “We’ll show them yet!  Next summer, please God, we shall be off to the Caucasus, and we will ride all over it on horseback—­trot, trot, trot!  And when we are back from the Caucasus I shouldn’t wonder if we will all dance at the wedding.”  Mihail Averyanitch gave a sly wink.  “We’ll marry you, my dear boy, we’ll marry you. . . .”

Andrey Yefimitch felt suddenly that the rising disgust had mounted to his throat, his heart began beating violently.

“That’s vulgar,” he said, getting up quickly and walking away to the window.  “Don’t you understand that you are talking vulgar nonsense?”

He meant to go on softly and politely, but against his will he suddenly clenched his fists and raised them above his head.

“Leave me alone,” he shouted in a voice unlike his own, blushing crimson and shaking all over.  “Go away, both of you!”

Mihail Averyanitch and Hobotov got up and stared at him first with amazement and then with alarm.

“Go away, both!” Andrey Yefimitch went on shouting.  “Stupid people!  Foolish people!  I don’t want either your friendship or your medicines, stupid man!  Vulgar!  Nasty!”

Hobotov and Mihail Averyanitch, looking at each other in bewilderment, staggered to the door and went out.  Andrey Yefimitch snatched up the bottle of bromide and flung it after them; the bottle broke with a crash on the door-frame.

“Go to the devil!” he shouted in a tearful voice, running out into the passage.  “To the devil!”

When his guests were gone Andrey Yefimitch lay down on the sofa, trembling as though in a fever, and went on for a long while repeating:  “Stupid people!  Foolish people!”

When he was calmer, what occurred to him first of all was the thought that poor Mihail Averyanitch must be feeling fearfully ashamed and depressed now, and that it was all dreadful.  Nothing like this had ever happened to him before.  Where was his intelligence and his tact?  Where was his comprehension of things and his philosophical indifference?

The doctor could not sleep all night for shame and vexation with himself, and at ten o’clock next morning he went to the post office and apologized to the postmaster.

“We won’t think again of what has happened,” Mihail Averyanitch, greatly touched, said with a sigh, warmly pressing his hand.  “Let bygones be bygones.  Lyubavkin,” he suddenly shouted so loud that all the postmen and other persons present started, “hand a chair; and you wait,” he shouted to a peasant woman who was stretching out a registered letter to him through the grating.  “Don’t you see that I am busy?  We will not remember the past,” he went on, affectionately addressing Andrey Yefimitch; “sit down, I beg you, my dear fellow.”