“Where’s Kleopatra?” Axinya asked softly, in a fluster, holding her breath; “and where is your cap, my dear?  Your wife, you say, has gone to Petersburg?”

She had been our servant in our mother’s time, and used once to give Kleopatra and me our baths, and to her we were still children who had to be talked to for their good.  For a quarter of an hour or so she laid before me all the reflections which she had with the sagacity of an old servant been accumulating in the stillness of that kitchen, all the time since we had seen each other.  She said that the doctor could be forced to marry Kleopatra; he only needed to be thoroughly frightened; and that if an appeal were promptly written the bishop would annul the first marriage; that it would be a good thing for me to sell Dubetchnya without my wife’s knowledge, and put the money in the bank in my own name; that if my sister and I were to bow down at my father’s feet and ask him properly, he might perhaps forgive us; that we ought to have a service sung to the Queen of Heaven. . . .

“Come, go along, my dear, and speak to him,” she said, when she heard my father’s cough.  “Go along, speak to him; bow down, your head won’t drop off.”

I went in.  My father was sitting at the table sketching a plan of a summer villa, with Gothic windows, and with a fat turret like a fireman’s watch tower—­something peculiarly stiff and tasteless.  Going into the study I stood still where I could see this drawing.  I did not know why I had gone in to my father, but I remember that when I saw his lean face, his red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw myself on his neck, and as Axinya had told me, bow down at his feet; but the sight of the summer villa with the Gothic windows, and the fat turret, restrained me.

“Good evening,” I said.

He glanced at me, and at once dropped his eyes on his drawing.

“What do you want?” he asked, after waiting a little.

“I have come to tell you my sister’s very ill.  She can’t live very long,” I added in a hollow voice.

“Well,” sighed my father, taking off his spectacles, and laying them on the table.  “What thou sowest that shalt thou reap.  What thou sowest,” he repeated, getting up from the table, “that shalt thou reap.  I ask you to remember how you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I begged you, I besought you to give up your errors; I reminded you of your duty, of your honour, of what you owed to your forefathers whose traditions we ought to preserve as sacred.  Did you obey me?  You scorned my counsels, and obstinately persisted in clinging to your false ideals; worse still you drew your sister into the path of error with you, and led her to lose her moral principles and sense of shame.  Now you are both in a bad way.  Well, as thou sowest, so shalt thou reap!”

As he said this he walked up and down the room.  He probably imagined that I had come to him to confess my wrong doings, and he probably expected that I should begin begging him to forgive my sister and me.  I was cold, I was shivering as though I were in a fever, and spoke with difficulty in a husky voice.