Kunin glanced at Father Yakov; he was sitting bent up, thinking intently about something and apparently not listening to his visitor.

“Yasha, come here!” a woman’s voice called from behind the partition.  Father Yakov started and went out.  Again a whispering began.

Kunin felt a pang of longing for tea.

“No; it’s no use my waiting for tea here,” he thought, looking at his watch.  “Besides I fancy I am not altogether a welcome visitor.  My host has not deigned to say one word to me; he simply sits and blinks.”

Kunin took up his hat, waited for Father Yakov to return, and said good-bye to him.

“I have simply wasted the morning,” he thought wrathfully on the way home.  “The blockhead!  The dummy!  He cares no more about the school than I about last year’s snow. . . .  No, I shall never get anything done with him!  We are bound to fail!  If the Marshal knew what the priest here was like, he wouldn’t be in such a hurry to talk about a school.  We ought first to try and get a decent priest, and then think about the school.”

By now Kunin almost hated Father Yakov.  The man, his pitiful, grotesque figure in the long crumpled robe, his womanish face, his manner of officiating, his way of life and his formal restrained respectfulness, wounded the tiny relic of religious feeling which was stored away in a warm corner of Kunin’s heart together with his nurse’s other fairy tales.  The coldness and lack of attention with which Father Yakov had met Kunin’s warm and sincere interest in what was the priest’s own work was hard for the former’s vanity to endure. . . .

On the evening of the same day Kunin spent a long time walking about his rooms and thinking.  Then he sat down to the table resolutely and wrote a letter to the bishop.  After asking for money and a blessing for the school, he set forth genuinely, like a son, his opinion of the priest at Sinkino.

“He is young,” he wrote, “insufficiently educated, leads, I fancy, an intemperate life, and altogether fails to satisfy the ideals which the Russian people have in the course of centuries formed of what a pastor should be.”

After writing this letter Kunin heaved a deep sigh, and went to bed with the consciousness that he had done a good deed.

On Monday morning, while he was still in bed, he was informed that Father Yakov had arrived.  He did not want to get up, and instructed the servant to say he was not at home.  On Tuesday he went away to a sitting of the Board, and when he returned on Saturday he was told by the servants that Father Yakov had called every day in his absence.

“He liked my biscuits, it seems,” he thought.

Towards evening on Sunday Father Yakov arrived.  This time not only his skirts, but even his hat, was bespattered with mud.  Just as on his first visit, he was hot and perspiring, and sat down on the edge of his chair as he had done then.  Kunin determined not to talk about the school—­not to cast pearls.