“It is all right, everything has gone well,” said Nadya hurriedly.  “Mother came to see me in Petersburg in the autumn; she said that Granny is not angry, and only keeps going into my room and making the sign of the cross over the walls.”

Sasha looked cheerful, but he kept coughing, and talked in a cracked voice, and Nadya kept looking at him, unable to decide whether he really were seriously ill or whether it were only her fancy.

“Dear Sasha,” she said, “you are ill.”

“No, it’s nothing, I am ill, but not very . . .”

“Oh, dear!” cried Nadya, in agitation.  “Why don’t you go to a doctor?  Why don’t you take care of your health?  My dear, darling Sasha,” she said, and tears gushed from her eyes and for some reason there rose before her imagination Andrey Andreitch and the naked lady with the vase, and all her past which seemed now as far away as her childhood; and she began crying because Sasha no longer seemed to her so novel, so cultured, and so interesting as the year before.  “Dear Sasha, you are very, very ill . . .  I would do anything to make you not so pale and thin.  I am so indebted to you!  You can’t imagine how much you have done for me, my good Sasha!  In reality you are now the person nearest and dearest to me.”

They sat on and talked, and now, after Nadya had spent a winter in Petersburg, Sasha, his works, his smile, his whole figure had for her a suggestion of something out of date, old-fashioned, done with long ago and perhaps already dead and buried.

“I am going down the Volga the day after tomorrow,” said Sasha, “and then to drink koumiss.  I mean to drink koumiss.  A friend and his wife are going with me.  His wife is a wonderful woman; I am always at her, trying to persuade her to go to the university.  I want her to turn her life upside down.”

After having talked they drove to the station.  Sasha got her tea and apples; and when the train began moving and he waved his handkerchief at her, smiling, it could be seen even from his legs that he was very ill and would not live long.

Nadya reached her native town at midday.  As she drove home from the station the streets struck her as very wide and the houses very small and squat; there were no people about, she met no one but the German piano-tuner in a rusty greatcoat.  And all the houses looked as though they were covered with dust.  Granny, who seemed to have grown quite old, but was as fat and plain as ever, flung her arms round Nadya and cried for a long time with her face on Nadya’s shoulder, unable to tear herself away.  Nina Ivanovna looked much older and plainer and seemed shrivelled up, but was still tightly laced, and still had diamonds flashing on her fingers.

“My darling,” she said, trembling all over, “my darling!”

Then they sat down and cried without speaking.  It was evident that both mother and grandmother realized that the past was lost and gone, never to return; they had now no position in society, no prestige as before, no right to invite visitors; so it is when in the midst of an easy careless life the police suddenly burst in at night and made a search, and it turns out that the head of the family has embezzled money or committed forgery—­and goodbye then to the easy careless life for ever!