When they drove up out of the ravine Anisim kept looking back towards the village.  It was a warm, bright day.  The cattle were being driven out for the first time, and the peasant girls and women were walking by the herd in their holiday dresses.  The dun-coloured bull bellowed, glad to be free, and pawed the ground with his forefeet.  On all sides, above and below, the larks were singing.  Anisim looked round at the elegant white church—­it had only lately been whitewashed—­and he thought how he had been praying in it five days before; he looked round at the school with its green roof, at the little river in which he used once to bathe and catch fish, and there was a stir of joy in his heart, and he wished that walls might rise up from the ground and prevent him from going further, and that he might be left with nothing but the past.

At the station they went to the refreshment room and drank a glass of sherry each.  His father felt in his pocket for his purse to pay.

“I will stand treat,” said Anisim.  The old man, touched and delighted, slapped him on the shoulder, and winked to the waiter as much as to say, “See what a fine son I have got.”

“You ought to stay at home in the business, Anisim,” he said; “you would be worth any price to me!  I would shower gold on you from head to foot, my son.”

“It can’t be done, papa.”

The sherry was sour and smelt of sealing-wax, but they had another glass.

When old Tsybukin returned home from the station, for the first moment he did not recognize his younger daughter-in-law.  As soon as her husband had driven out of the yard, Lipa was transformed and suddenly brightened up.  Wearing a threadbare old petticoat, with her feet bare and her sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a big tub of dirty water and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile it seemed as though she, too, were a lark.

An old labourer who was passing by the door shook his head and cleared his throat.

“Yes, indeed, your daughters-in-law, Grigory Petrovitch, are a blessing from God,” he said.  “Not women, but treasures!”

V

On Friday the 8th of July, Elizarov, nicknamed Crutch, and Lipa were returning from the village of Kazanskoe, where they had been to a service on the occasion of a church holiday in the honour of the Holy Mother of Kazan.  A good distance after them walked Lipa’s mother Praskovya, who always fell behind, as she was ill and short of breath.  It was drawing towards evening.

“A-a-a...” said Crutch, wondering as he listened to Lipa.  “A-a!...  We-ell!

“I am very fond of jam, Ilya Makaritch,” said Lipa.  “I sit down in my little corner and drink tea and eat jam.  Or I drink it with Varvara Nikolaevna, and she tells some story full of feeling.  We have a lot of jam—­four jars.  ‘Have some, Lipa; eat as much as you like.’”