“Excuse me, you were so kind as to give me three pilules.  One I took at dinner and the effect was instantaneous!  Another in the evening, and the third next day; and since then not a touch!  Not a twinge anywhere!  And you know I thought I was dying, I had written to Moscow for my son to come!  The Lord has given you wisdom, our lady of healing!  Now I am walking, and feel as though I were in Paradise.  The Tuesday I came to you I was hobbling, and now I am ready to run after a hare. . . .  I could live for a hundred years.  There’s only one trouble, our lack of means.  I’m well now, but what’s the use of health if there’s nothing to live on?  Poverty weighs on me worse than illness. . . .  For example, take this . . .  It’s the time to sow oats, and how is one to sow it if one has no seed?  I ought to buy it, but the money . . . everyone knows how we are off for money. . . .”

“I will give you oats, Kuzma Kuzmitch. . . .  Sit down, sit down.  You have so delighted me, you have given me so much pleasure that it’s not you but I that should say thank you!”

“You are our joy!  That the Lord should create such goodness!  Rejoice, Madam, looking at your good deeds! . . .  While we sinners have no cause for rejoicing in ourselves. . . .  We are paltry, poor-spirited, useless people . . . a mean lot. . . .  We are only gentry in name, but in a material sense we are the same as peasants, only worse. . . .  We live in stone houses, but it’s a mere make-believe . . . for the roof leaks.  And there is no money to buy wood to mend it with.”

“I’ll give you the wood, Kuzma Kuzmitch.”

Zamuhrishen asks for and gets a cow too, a letter of recommendation for his daughter whom he wants to send to a boarding school, and . . . touched by the lady’s liberality he whimpers with excess of feeling, twists his mouth, and feels in his pocket for his handkerchief . . . .

Marfa Petrovna sees a red paper slip out of his pocket with his handkerchief and fall noiselessly to the floor.

“I shall never forget it to all eternity . . .” he mutters, “and I shall make my children and my grandchildren remember it . . . from generation to generation.  ‘See, children,’ I shall say, ’who has saved me from the grave, who . . .’”

When she has seen her patient out, the lady looks for a minute at Father Aristark with eyes full of tears, then turns her caressing, reverent gaze on the drug chest, the books, the bills, the armchair in which the man she had saved from death has just been sitting, and her eyes fall on the paper just dropped by her patient.  She picks up the paper, unfolds it, and sees in it three pilules—­the very pilules she had given Zamuhrishen the previous Tuesday.

“They are the very ones,” she thinks puzzled. “. . .  The paper is the same. . . .  He hasn’t even unwrapped them!  What has he taken then?  Strange. . . .  Surely he wouldn’t try to deceive me!”