“I will come,” answered David:  “I will see to it.  And your father?”

“He cries and says, ’You’ll spoil me, too!’—­he means bury him.  Now he has gone to sleep.”  Raissa suddenly drew a deep sigh:  “Oh, David!  David!” She drew her half-closed hand across her brow and eyes, a gesture graceful and sad, like all her movements.

“But you must take care of yourself,” said David.  “You can’t have slept at all; and why cry?  It won’t help matters.”

“I have no time to cry,” answered Raissa.

“The rich can indulge themselves in the luxury of crying,” said David.

Raissa started to go, but she turned back:  “We are thinking of selling the yellow shawl:  you know the one that belonged to mother’s trousseau.  We have been offered twelve rubles for it.  I think that is too little.”

“Yes, indeed, much too little.”

“We wouldn’t sell it,” said Raissa after a short pause, “if we didn’t need money for the funeral.”

“Yes, of course, but you mustn’t throw money away.  These priests—­it’s a shame!  But wait:  I’ll be there.  Are you going?  I’ll be there soon.  Good-bye, little dove!”

“Good-bye, brother, dear heart!”

“And don’t cry.”

“Cry?  Cook or cry, one of the two.”

“What! does she do the cooking?” I asked of David when Raissa had gone.  “Does she do the cooking herself?”

“You heard what she said:  the cook has gone out to buy the coffin.”

She cooks, I thought to myself, and she always has such clean hands and dresses so neatly!  I should like to see her in the kitchen.  She’s a strange girl.

I remember another conversation by the hedge.  This time Raissa had her little deaf-and-dumb sister with her.  She was a pretty child, with great, startled eyes, and a wilderness of short, dark hair on her little head:  Raissa had also dark, lustreless hair.  It was soon after Latkin’s attack of paralysis.

“I don’t know what to do,” began Raissa:  “the doctor has prescribed something for father, and I must go to the apothecary’s’; and our serf” (Latkin had still one serf left) “has brought us some wood from the village, and also a goose.  But the landlord has taken it away.  ‘You are in my debt,’ he said.”

“Did he take the goose?” asked David.

“No, he did not take the goose.  ‘It’s too old,’ he said, ’and it’s worth nothing:  that’s the reason the man brought it to you.’”

“But he had no right to it,” cried David.

“He had no right to it, but he took it all the same.  I went into the garret—­we have an old chest there—­and I hunted through it; and see what I found.”  She took out from under her shawl a great spy-glass, finished in copper and yellow morocco.

David, as an amateur and connoisseur of every kind of instrument, seized it at once.  “An English glass,” he said, holding it first at one eye and then at the other—­“a marine telescope.”