door and opened it, let some one in and closed it again. Then followed an expectant silence.
"Whom do you want?" asked Matryona in a hoarse, unfriendly tone. A stranger's voice, gentle and broken, bashfully replied:
"I want Katya Nyechayeva. She lives here?"
"She did. But what do you want with her?"
"I want her very badly. Is she not at home?" and in her voice there was a note of fear.
"Katya is dead. She died, I say—in the hospital."
Again there was a long silence, so long indeed that Khinyakov felt a pain at his back; but he did not dare to move it, while the people there kept silence.
Then the stranger's voice pronounced gently and without expression, the one word:
"Good-bye!"
But evidently she did not go away, since in the course of a minute Matryona asked: "What have you there? Have you brought something for Katya?"
Some one knelt down, striking her knees on the floor, and the stranger's voice, convulsed with suppressed sobs, uttered quickly the words:
"Take it, take it! For the love of God, take it! And then I—I'll go away."
"But what is it?"
Again there was a long silence, and then a gentle weeping, broken, and hopeless. There was in it a deadly weariness, and a black despair,
