The moon peeped in at the window, the floor was lighted up, and there were shadows on it.  A cricket was chirping.  Through the wall Father Sisoy was snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound that suggested loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy.  Sisoy had once been housekeeper to the bishop of the diocese, and was called now “the former Father Housekeeper”; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery twelve miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the town, too.  He had come to the Pankratievsky Monastery three days before, and the bishop had kept him that he might talk to him at his leisure about matters of business, about the arrangements here. . . .

At half-past one they began ringing for matins.  Father Sisoy could be heard coughing, muttering something in a discontented voice, then he got up and walked barefoot about the rooms.

“Father Sisoy,” the bishop called.

Sisoy went back to his room and a little later made his appearance in his boots, with a candle; he had on his cassock over his underclothes and on his head was an old faded skull-cap.

“I can’t sleep,” said the bishop, sitting up.  “I must be unwell.  And what it is I don’t know.  Fever!”

“You must have caught cold, your holiness.  You must be rubbed with tallow.”  Sisoy stood a little and yawned.  “O Lord, forgive me, a sinner.”

“They had the electric lights on at Erakin’s today,” he said; “I don’t like it!”

Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always dissatisfied with something, and his eyes were angry-looking and prominent as a crab’s.

“I don’t like it,” he said, going away.  “I don’t like it.  Bother it!”

II

Next day, Palm Sunday, the bishop took the service in the cathedral in the town, then he visited the bishop of the diocese, then visited a very sick old lady, the widow of a general, and at last drove home.  Between one and two o’clock he had welcome visitors dining with him—­his mother and his niece Katya, a child of eight years old.  All dinner-time the spring sunshine was streaming in at the windows, throwing bright light on the white tablecloth and on Katya’s red hair.  Through the double windows they could hear the noise of the rooks and the notes of the starlings in the garden.

“It is nine years since we have met,” said the old lady.  “And when I looked at you in the monastery yesterday, good Lord! you’ve not changed a bit, except maybe you are thinner and your beard is a little longer.  Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven!  Yesterday at the evening service no one could help crying.  I, too, as I looked at you, suddenly began crying, though I couldn’t say why.  His Holy Will!”