At tea, too, the boys were still absent, and by supper-time Volodya’s mother was dreadfully uneasy, and even shed tears.

Late in the evening they sent again to the village, they searched everywhere, and walked along the river bank with lanterns.  Heavens! what a fuss there was!

Next day the police officer came, and a paper of some sort was written out in the dining-room.  Their mother cried. . . .

All of a sudden a sledge stopped at the door, with three white horses in a cloud of steam.

“Volodya’s come,” someone shouted in the yard.

“Master Volodya’s here!” bawled Natalya, running into the dining-room.  And Milord barked his deep bass, “bow-wow.”

It seemed that the boys had been stopped in the Arcade, where they had gone from shop to shop asking where they could get gunpowder.

Volodya burst into sobs as soon as he came into the hall, and flung himself on his mother’s neck.  The little girls, trembling, wondered with terror what would happen next.  They saw their father take Volodya and Lentilov into his study, and there he talked to them a long while.

“Is this a proper thing to do?” their father said to them.  “I only pray they won’t hear of it at school, you would both be expelled.  You ought to be ashamed, Mr. Lentilov, really.  It’s not at all the thing to do!  You began it, and I hope you will be punished by your parents.  How could you?  Where did you spend the night?”

“At the station,” Lentilov answered proudly.

Then Volodya went to bed, and had a compress, steeped in vinegar, on his forehead.

A telegram was sent off, and next day a lady, Lentilov’s mother, made her appearance and bore off her son.

Lentilov looked morose and haughty to the end, and he did not utter a single word at taking leave of the little girls.  But he took Katya’s book and wrote in it as a souvenir:  “Montehomo, the Hawk’s Claw, Chief of the Ever Victorious.”

SHROVE TUESDAY

“Pavel Vassilitch!” cries Pelageya Ivanovna, waking her husband.  “Pavel Vassilitch!  You might go and help Styopa with his lessons, he is sitting crying over his book.  He can’t understand something again!”

Pavel Vassilitch gets up, makes the sign of the cross over his mouth as he yawns, and says softly:  “In a minute, my love!”

The cat who has been asleep beside him gets up too, straightens out its tail, arches its spine, and half-shuts its eyes.  There is stillness. . . .  Mice can be heard scurrying behind the wall-paper.  Putting on his boots and his dressing-gown, Pavel Vassilitch, crumpled and frowning from sleepiness, comes out of his bedroom into the dining-room; on his entrance another cat, engaged in sniffing a marinade of fish in the window, jumps down to the floor, and hides behind the cupboard.

“Who asked you to sniff that!” he says angrily, covering the fish with a sheet of newspaper.  “You are a pig to do that, not a cat. . . .”