“The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and the tenant hasn’t paid his rent.  Will you let me pay it out of the fifteen thousand your papa left you?”

All day afterwards Auntie Dasha spent in making cherry jam in the garden.  Alyona, with her cheeks flushed with the heat, ran to and from the garden to the house and back again to the cellar.

When Auntie Dasha was making jam with a very serious face as though she were performing a religious rite, and her short sleeves displayed her strong, little, despotic hands and arms, and when the servants ran about incessantly, bustling about the jam which they would never taste, there was always a feeling of martyrdom in the air. . . .

The garden smelt of hot cherries.  The sun had set, the charcoal stove had been carried away, but the pleasant, sweetish smell still lingered in the air.  Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new labourer, a young soldier, not of the neighbourhood, who was, by her express orders, making new paths.  He was cutting the turf with a spade and heaping it up on a barrow.

“Where were you serving?” Vera asked him.

“At Berdyansk.”

“And where are you going now?  Home?”

“No,” answered the labourer.  “I have no home.”

“But where were you born and brought up?”

“In the province of Oryol.  Till I went into the army I lived with my mother, in my step-father’s house; my mother was the head of the house, and people looked up to her, and while she lived I was cared for.  But while I was in the army I got a letter telling me my mother was dead. . . .  And now I don’t seem to care to go home.  It’s not my own father, so it’s not like my own home.”

“Then your father is dead?”

“I don’t know.  I am illegitimate.”

At that moment Auntie Dasha appeared at the window and said: 

“Il ne faut pas parler aux gens . . . . Go into the kitchen, my good man.  You can tell your story there,” she said to the soldier.

And then came as yesterday and every day supper, reading, a sleepless night, and endless thinking about the same thing.  At three o’clock the sun rose; Alyona was already busy in the corridor, and Vera was not asleep yet and was trying to read.  She heard the creak of the barrow:  it was the new labourer at work in the garden. . . .  Vera sat at the open window with a book, dozed, and watched the soldier making the paths for her, and that interested her.  The paths were as even and level as a leather strap, and it was pleasant to imagine what they would be like when they were strewn with yellow sand.

She could see her aunt come out of the house soon after five o’clock, in a pink wrapper and curl-papers.  She stood on the steps for three minutes without speaking, and then said to the soldier: 

“Take your passport and go in peace.  I can’t have any one illegitimate in my house.”