your love and faithfulness—but how to get up? Let me sign you with the cross,' Malania Pavlovna moved closer, bent down. . . But the hand he had raised fell back powerless on the quilt, and a few moments later Alexey Sergeitch was no more.
His daughters arrived only on the day of the funeral with their husbands; they had no children either of them. Alexey Sergeitch showed them no animosity in his will, though he never even mentioned them on his deathbed. 'My heart has grown hard to them,' he once said to me. Knowing his kindly nature, I was surprised at his words. It is hard to judge between parents and children. 'A great ravine starts from a little rift,' Alexey Sergeitch said to me once in this connection: 'a wound a yard wide may heal; but once cut off even a finger nail, it will not grow again.'
I fancy the daughters were ashamed of their eccentric old parents.
A month later and Malania Pavlovna too passed away. From the very day of Alexey Sergeitch's death she had hardly risen from her bed, and had not put on her usual attire; but they buried her in the blue jacket, and with Orlov's medallion on her shoulder, only without the diamonds. Those her daughters divided, on the pretext that the diamonds should be used in the setting of some holy pictures; in reality, they used them to adorn their own persons.
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