When we were alone we burst into tears, sitting and embracing each other on the bed; we wept and laughed together at our great unforeseen happiness in our marriage. All night we did not sleep, but kissed each other and planned how we would live with each other. We lit the candle in order to see each other better. "We will live so that all will love us. It is good to be with you, Matvei." We were drunk with our unutterable happiness, and I said to Olga: "May the Lord strike me dead, Olga, if on account of me you should weep other tears." But she said to me: "I will bear everything from you. I will be your mother and your sister, my lonely one." CHAPTER VI We lived together in a dream. I worked automatically, saw nothing and did not wish to see anything. I hurried home to my wife and walked with her in the fields and in the woods. My past came back to me. I caught birds and our home became light and airy with the cages which were hung on the walls and the singing of the birds. My gentle wife loved them, and when I came home she told me how the tomtit behaved and how the client-finch sang. In the evening I read Minea or the Prologue, but more often I spoke to my wife of my childhood and of Larion and Savelko; how they sang songs to the Lord and how they talked about Him. I told her about crazy old Vlassi, who was dead by this time. I told her everything that I knew, and it seemed that I knew very much about man and birds and fish. I cannot describe my happiness in words, for a man who has never known happiness and only enjoys it for a little time, never can describe it. We went together to church and stood next to each other in a corner and prayed in unison. I offered prayers of thanks to God in order to praise Him, though not without secret pride, for it seemed to me that I had conquered God's might and forced Him, against His will, to make me happy. He had given in to me and I praised Him for it: "Thou hast done well, O Lord," I said, "but it is only just and right, what Thou hast done." Oh, the miserable paganism of it! The winter passed like one long day of joy. One day Olga confided to me that she was to become a mother. It was a new happiness for us. My father-in-law murmured something indistinctly and my mother-in-law looked with pity at my wife. I began to think of bettering my condition a little; I decided to have a beehive, and I called it "Larion's Garden," so that it should bring me luck. Also, I planned to have a vegetable garden, and to breed song-birds, and I thought of doing things which would bring no harm to man. One day Titoff said to me, quite harshly: "You have become so sugar-coated, Matvei; see that you do not get sour. You will have a child in the summer. Have you forgotten that?" I had already wished to tell him the truth as I understood it then, so I said to him: "I have sinned as much as I wished. I have become like you in sins--just as you desired. But to become worse than you, that I will not."