She sank back on her pillows with closed eyelids, through which the tears were slowing oozing. Michael did not go on with his reading. They were both thinking of the last twelve months, when Catherine Ivanoff had left her Russian home to try if her native air in Scotland would restore her health. Michael had accompanied her, being old enough to be a help and comfort to her during the long voyage from Odessa to Glasgow, and through her sojourn among her own kinsfolk. It had been on the whole a happy year, filled at first with delusive hopes. But all hope was gone now. She would never be able to bear the voyage and the inland journey homewards. Her brother's house, where she lay dying, was a small Scotch farm, not unlike the homestead she had left in Russia. She lay still, thinking longingly of it now. The thick walls of dried mud, with their deep window-sills; the large house-place, with its oak table, and oak benches standing along the walls, which she had kept beautifully polished; the huge stove, which seemed to fill half the room; and the great barns and stables built round the fold-yard. Oh, if she had only been there now!—dying in the little bedroom which opened out of the roomy house-place, where she could watch her husband going to and fro, and have her little Velia in her sight. Her house in Knishi had been the best in the village, almost equal to the church-house; and she had cherished a secret pride in it. The garden on the eastern side was even better than the priest's garden, for her husband as well as herself took great pleasure in it. It was already near the end of February; and the snow would be melting, and the buds swelling on the fruit-trees, and the earliest flowers pushing their first shoots through the moist earth. Oh, how happy she and her husband had been in Knishi! It was eight years since they had gone there, with their two young children, to rent a farm belonging to her husband's cousin, Paul Rodenko, who had been exiled to Siberia for holding fast to his Stundist faith. A sharp outbreak of persecution had taken place, during which three of the leading Stundists had been imprisoned—one of them dying in prison. And the mother of Paul Rodenko had fallen a martyr to the uncurbed violence of a mob. There had been some official inquiries into the cause of her death. And though no one was punished, the peasants, after their wild excess of savagery, were ashamed of the crime. Since then the Stundists had been unmolested, left very much to themselves, and practically cut off from all village intercourse. Alexis Ivanoff was their presbyter; and though they had no stated hour or place of worship, it was well-known they maintained their own religious views.