Kukin was buried on Tuesday in the Vagankov Cemetery in Moscow.  Olenka returned home on Wednesday; and as soon as she entered her house she threw herself on her bed and broke into such loud sobbing that she could be heard in the street and in the neighbouring yards.

“The darling!” said the neighbours, crossing themselves.  “How Olga Semyonovna, the poor darling, is grieving!”

Three months afterwards Olenka was returning home from mass, downhearted and in deep mourning.  Beside her walked a man also returning from church, Vasily Pustovalov, the manager of the merchant Babakayev’s lumber-yard.  He was wearing a straw hat, a white vest with a gold chain, and looked more like a landowner than a business man.

“Everything has its ordained course, Olga Semyonovna,” he said sedately, with sympathy in his voice.  “And if any one near and dear to us dies, then it means it was God’s will and we should remember that and bear it with submission.”

He took her to the wicket-gate, said good-bye and went away.  After that she heard his sedate voice the whole day; and on closing her eyes she instantly had a vision of his dark beard.  She took a great liking to him.  And evidently he had been impressed by her, too; for, not long after, an elderly woman, a distant acquaintance, came in to have a cup of coffee with her.  As soon as the woman was seated at table she began to speak about Pustovalov—­how good he was, what a steady man, and any woman could be glad to get him as a husband.  Three days later Pustovalov himself paid Olenka a visit.  He stayed only about ten minutes, and spoke little, but Olenka fell in love with him, fell in love so desperately that she did not sleep the whole night and burned as with fever.  In the morning she sent for the elderly woman.  Soon after, Olenka and Pustovalov were engaged, and the wedding followed.

Pustovalov and Olenka lived happily together.  He usually stayed in the lumber-yard until dinner, then went out on business.  In his absence Olenka took his place in the office until evening, attending to the book-keeping and despatching the orders.

“Lumber rises twenty per cent every year nowadays,” she told her customers and acquaintances.  “Imagine, we used to buy wood from our forests here.  Now Vasichka has to go every year to the government of Mogilev to get wood.  And what a tax!” she exclaimed, covering her cheeks with her hands in terror.  “What a tax!”

She felt as if she had been dealing in lumber for ever so long, that the most important and essential thing in life was lumber.  There was something touching and endearing in the way she pronounced the words, “beam,” “joist,” “plank,” “stave,” “lath,” “gun-carriage,” “clamp.”  At night she dreamed of whole mountains of boards and planks, long, endless rows of wagons conveying the wood somewhere, far, far from the city.  She dreamed that a whole regiment of beams, 36 ft. x 5 in., were advancing in an upright position to do battle against the lumber-yard; that the beams and joists and clamps were knocking against each other, emitting the sharp crackling reports of dry wood, that they were all falling and then rising again, piling on top of each other.  Olenka cried out in her sleep, and Pustovalov said to her gently: