At three o’clock they had dinner.  In the evening they prepared the lessons together, and Olenka wept with Sasha over the difficulties.  When she put him to bed, she lingered a long time making the sign of the cross over him and muttering a prayer.  And when she lay in bed, she dreamed of the far-away, misty future when Sasha would finish his studies and become a doctor or an engineer, have a large house of his own, with horses and a carriage, marry and have children.  She would fall asleep still thinking of the same things, and tears would roll down her cheeks from her closed eyes.  And the black cat would lie at her side purring:  “Mrr, mrr, mrr.”

Suddenly there was a loud knocking at the gate.  Olenka woke up breathless with fright, her heart beating violently.  Half a minute later there was another knock.

“A telegram from Kharkov,” she thought, her whole body in a tremble.  “His mother wants Sasha to come to her in Kharkov.  Oh, great God!”

She was in despair.  Her head, her feet, her hands turned cold.  There was no unhappier creature in the world, she felt.  But another minute passed, she heard voices.  It was the veterinarian coming home from the club.

“Thank God,” she thought.  The load gradually fell from her heart, she was at ease again.  And she went back to bed, thinking of Sasha who lay fast asleep in the next room and sometimes cried out in his sleep: 

“I’ll give it to you!  Get away!  Quit your scrapping!”

THE BET

BY ANTON P. CHEKHOV

I

It was a dark autumn night.  The old banker was pacing from corner to corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen years before.  There were many clever people at the party and much interesting conversation.  They talked among other things of capital punishment.  The guests, among them not a few scholars and journalists, for the most part disapproved of capital punishment.  They found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to a Christian State and immoral.  Some of them thought that capital punishment should be replaced universally by life-imprisonment.

“I don’t agree with you,” said the host.  “I myself have experienced neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may judge a priori, then in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and more humane than imprisonment.  Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment kills by degrees.  Who is the more humane executioner, one who kills you in a few seconds or one who draws the life out of you incessantly, for years?”

“They’re both equally immoral,” remarked one of the guests, “because their purpose is the same, to take away life.  The State is not God.  It has no right to take away that which it cannot give back, if it should so desire.”

Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five.  On being asked his opinion, he said: