It was Friday, and in the dining room the German watchmaker was winding up the clock.  Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this punctual, bald watchmaker, “that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches,” and he smiled.  Stepan Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke:  “And maybe she will come round!  That’s a good expression, ‘come round,’” he thought.  “I must repeat that.”

“Matvey!” he shouted.  “Arrange everything with Darya in the sitting room for Anna Arkadyevna,” he said to Matvey when he came in.

“Yes, sir.”

Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.

“You won’t dine at home?” said Matvey, seeing him off.

“That’s as it happens.  But here’s for the housekeeping,” he said, taking ten roubles from his pocketbook.  “That’ll be enough.”

“Enough or not enough, we must make it do,” said Matvey, slamming the carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.

Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back again to her bedroom.  It was her solitary refuge from the household cares which crowded upon her directly she went out from it.  Even now, in the short time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matrona Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer:  “What were the children to put on for their walk?  Should they have any milk?  Should not a new cook be sent for?”

“Ah, let me alone, let me alone!” she said, and going back to her bedroom she sat down in the same place as she had sat when talking to her husband, clasping tightly her thin hands with the rings that slipped down on her bony fingers, and fell to going over in her memory all the conversation.  “He has gone!  But has he broken it off with her?” she thought.  “Can it be he sees her?  Why didn’t I ask him!  No, no, reconciliation is impossible.  Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers—­strangers forever!” She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her.  “And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!....  How I loved him!  And now don’t I love him?  Don’t I love him more than before?  The most horrible thing is,” she began, but did not finish her thought, because Matrona Philimonovna put her head in at the door.

“Let us send for my brother,” she said; “he can get a dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like yesterday.”

“Very well, I will come directly and see about it.  But did you send for some new milk?”

And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.

Chapter 5