‘Eh, ma’am,’ Harlov rejoined, not without vexation, ‘you will keep coming back to that. There is, maybe, a higher power at work in this, and you talk of melancholy. I thought to do this, madam, because in my own person, while still in life, I wish to decide in my presence, who is to possess what, and with what I will reward each, so that they may possess, and feel thankfulness, and carry out my wishes, and what their father and benefactor has resolved upon, they may accept as a bountiful gift.’ Harlov’s voice broke again. ‘Come, that’s enough, that’s enough, my good friend,’ my mother cut him short; ‘or your raven colt will be putting in an appearance in earnest.’ ‘O Natalia Nikolaevna, don’t talk to me of it,’ groaned Harlov. ‘That’s my death come after me. Forgive my intrusion. And you, my little sir, I shall have the honour of expecting you the day after to-morrow.’ Martin Petrovitch went out; my mother looked after him, and shook her head significantly. ‘This is a bad business,’ she murmured, ‘a bad business. You noticed’--she addressed herself to me--‘he talked, and all the while seemed blinking, as though the sun were in his eyes; that’s a bad sign. When a man’s like that, his heart’s sure to be heavy, and misfortune threatens him. You must go over the day after to-morrow with Vikenty Osipovitch and Souvenir.’ XI On the day appointed, our big family coach, with seats for four, harnessed with six bay horses, and with the head coachman, the grey-bearded and portly Alexeitch, on the box, rolled smoothly up to the steps of our house. The importance of the act upon which Harlov was about to enter, and the solemnity with which he had invited us, had had their effect on my mother. She had herself given orders for this extraordinary state equipage to be brought out, and had directed Souvenir and me to put on our best clothes. She obviously wished to show respect to her protégé. As for Kvitsinsky, he always wore a frock-coat and white tie. Souvenir chattered like a magpie all the way, giggled, wondered whether his brother would apportion him anything, and thereupon called him a dummy and an old fogey. Kvitsinsky, a man of severe and bilious temperament, could not put up with it at last ‘What can induce you,’ he observed, in his distinct Polish accent, ‘to keep up such a continual unseemly chatter? Can you really be incapable of sitting quiet without these “wholly superfluous” (his favourite phrase) inanities?’ ‘All right, d’rectly,’ Souvenir muttered discontentedly, and he fixed his squinting eyes on the carriage window. A quarter of an hour had not passed, the smoothly trotting horses had scarcely begun to get warm under the straps of their new harness, when Harlov’s homestead came into sight. Through the widely open gate, our coach rolled into the yard. The diminutive postillion, whose legs hardly reached half-way down his horses’ body, for the last time leaped up with a