“Goodness,” wailed Sasha.  “He won’t let me sleep with his talking!”

“Oh, yes!” said Liharev, startled.  “I am sorry, darling, sleep, sleep. . . .  I have two boys besides her,” he whispered.  “They are living with their uncle, Madam, but this one can’t exist a day without her father.  She’s wretched, she complains, but she sticks to me like a fly to honey.  I have been chattering too much, Madam, and it would do you no harm to sleep.  Wouldn’t you like me to make up a bed for you?”

Without waiting for permission he shook the wet pelisse, stretched it on a bench, fur side upwards, collected various shawls and scarves, put the overcoat folded up into a roll for a pillow, and all this he did in silence with a look of devout reverence, as though he were not handling a woman’s rags, but the fragments of holy vessels.  There was something apologetic, embarrassed about his whole figure, as though in the presence of a weak creature he felt ashamed of his height and strength. . . .

When Mlle. Ilovaisky had lain down, he put out the candle and sat down on a stool by the stove.

“So, Madam,” he whispered, lighting a fat cigarette and puffing the smoke into the stove.  “Nature has put into the Russian an extraordinary faculty for belief, a searching intelligence, and the gift of speculation, but all that is reduced to ashes by irresponsibility, laziness, and dreamy frivolity. . . .  Yes. . . .”

She gazed wonderingly into the darkness, and saw only a spot of red on the ikon and the flicker of the light of the stove on Liharev’s face.  The darkness, the chime of the bells, the roar of the storm, the lame boy, Sasha with her fretfulness, unhappy Liharev and his sayings—­all this was mingled together, and seemed to grow into one huge impression, and God’s world seemed to her fantastic, full of marvels and magical forces.  All that she had heard was ringing in her ears, and human life presented itself to her as a beautiful poetic fairy-tale without an end.

The immense impression grew and grew, clouded consciousness, and turned into a sweet dream.  She was asleep, though she saw the little ikon lamp and a big nose with the light playing on it.

She heard the sound of weeping.

“Daddy, darling,” a child’s voice was tenderly entreating, “let’s go back to uncle!  There is a Christmas-tree there!  Styopa and Kolya are there!”

“My darling, what can I do?” a man’s bass persuaded softly.  “Understand me!  Come, understand!”

And the man’s weeping blended with the child’s.  This voice of human sorrow, in the midst of the howling of the storm, touched the girl’s ear with such sweet human music that she could not bear the delight of it, and wept too.  She was conscious afterwards of a big, black shadow coming softly up to her, picking up a shawl that had dropped on to the floor and carefully wrapping it round her feet.