“I’m delighted to see you,” I say shrugging my shoulders. “But I’m surprised. You might have dropped straight from heaven. What are you doing here?” “I?... I just came.” Silence. Suddenly she gets up impetuously and comes over to me. “Nicolai Stiepanich!” she says, growing pale and pressing her hands to her breast. “Nicolai Stiepanich! I can’t go on like this any longer. I can’t. For God’s sake tell me now, immediately. What shall I do? Tell me, what shall I do?” “What can I say? I am beaten. I can say nothing.” “But tell me, I implore you,” she continues, out of breath and trembling all over her body. “I swear to you, I can’t go on like this any longer. I haven’t the strength.” She drops into a chair and begins to sob. She throws her head back, wrings her hands, stamps with her feet; her hat falls from her head and dangles by its string, her hair is loosened. “Help me, help,” she implores. “I can’t bear it any more.” She takes a handkerchief out of her little travelling bag and with it pulls out some letters which fall from her knees to the floor. I pick them up from the floor and recognise on one of them Mikhail Fiodorovich’s hand-writing, and accidentally read part of a word: “passionat....” “There’s nothing that I can say to you, Katy,” I say. “Help me,” she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. “You’re my father, my only friend. You’re wise and learned, and you’ve lived long! You were a teacher. Tell me what to do.” I am bewildered and surprised, stirred by her sobbing, and I can hardly stand upright. “Let’s have some breakfast, Katy,” I say with a constrained smile. Instantly I add in a sinking voice: “I shall be dead soon, Katy....” “Only one word, only one word,” she weeps and stretches out her hands to me. “What shall I do?” “You’re a queer thing, really ...”, I murmur. “I can’t understand it. Such a clever woman and suddenly--weeping....” Comes silence. Katy arranges her hair, puts on her hat, then crumples her letters and stuffs them in her little bag, all in silence and unhurried. Her face, her bosom and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression is dry already, stern.... I look at her and am ashamed that I am happier than she. It was but a little while before my death, in the ebb of my life, that I noticed in myself the absence of what our friends the philosophers call the general idea; but this poor thing’s soul has never known and never will know shelter all her life, all her life. “Katy, let’s have breakfast,” I say. “No, thank you,” she answers coldly. One minute more passes in silence. “I don’t like Kharkov,” I say. “It’s too grey. A grey city.” “Yes ... ugly.... I’m not here for long.... On my way. I leave to-day.” “For where?” “For the Crimea ... I mean, the Caucasus.” “So. For long?” “I don’t know.” Katy gets up and gives me her hand with a cold smile, looking away from me.