"Here I am at home, here I have got back,"--said Lavretzky to himself, as he entered the tiny anteroom, while the shutters were opened, one after the other, with a bang and a squeak, and the daylight penetrated into the deserted rooms. XIX The tiny house where Lavretzky had arrived, and where, two years previously, Glafira Petrovna had breathed her last, had been built in the previous century, out of sturdy pine lumber; in appearance it was decrepit, but was capable of standing another fifty years or more. Lavretzky made the round of all the rooms, and, to the great discomfiture of the aged, languid flies, with white dust on their backs, who were sitting motionless under the lintels of the doors, he ordered all the windows to be opened; no one had opened them since the death of Glafira Petrovna. Everything in the house remained as it had been: the small, spindle-legged couches in the drawing-room, covered with glossy grey material, worn through and flattened down, vividly recalled the days of Katherine II; in the drawing-room, also, stood the mistress's favourite chair, with a tall, straight back, against which, even in her old age, she had not leaned. On the principal wall hung an ancient portrait of Feodor's great-grandfather, Andrei Lavretzky; the dark, sallow face was barely discernible against the warped and blackened background; the small, vicious eyes gazed surlily from beneath pendent, swollen lids; the black hair, devoid of powder, rose in a brush over the heavy, deeply-seamed brow. On the corner of the portrait hung a wreath of dusty immortelles. "Glafira Petrovna herself was pleased to weave it," announced Anton. In the bedchamber rose a narrow bed, under a tester of ancient, striped material, of very excellent quality; a mountain of faded pillows, and a thin quilted coverlet, lay on the bed, and by the head of the bed hung an image of the Presentation in the Temple of the All-Holy Birthgiver of God, the very same image to which the old spinster, as she lay dying alone and forgotten by every one, had pressed for the last time, her lips which were already growing cold. The toilet-table, of inlaid wood with brass trimmings and a crooked mirror with tarnished gilding, stood by the window. Alongside the bedroom was the room for the holy pictures, a tiny chamber, with bare walls and a heavy shrine of images in the corner; on the floor lay a small, threadbare rug, spotted with wax; Glafira Petrovna had been wont to make her prostrations upon it. Anton went off with Lavretzky's lackey to open the stable and carriage-house; in his stead, there presented herself an old woman, almost of the same age as he, with a kerchief bound round her head, down to her very brows; her head trembled, and her eyes gazed dully, but expressed zeal, and a long-established habit of serving with assiduity, and, at the same time, a certain respectful commiseration. She kissed