For six years Borisoff had lived with young Peter Nazimoff, as his tutor and teacher, and loved him sincerely. The boy had already reached the highest class at school, when his sister, two years older than he, finished her schooling, and returned to her father's house, about the time of the general's second marriage. What the young tutor tried not to notice and to endure, for love of his pupil, in the first year of the general's second marriage, became intolerable when the general's daughter returned home, and to all the burden of his difficult position was added the knowledge of their mutual love. He proceeded frankly, and the whole matter was soon settled. But the young man had never uttered a syllable as to the cause of Madame Nazimoff's hatred for him. For the sake of his father-in-law's peace of mind, he sincerely hoped that he would never know. Anna was convinced that the whole cause of her step-mother's hostility was her prejudice against what was in her opinion a _mesalliance_. In part she was right, but the chief reason of this hostility remained forever a secret to her. Unfortunately, it was not equally a secret to her father. Of late years he had gradually been losing faith in his second wife's character. It went so far that the general felt much more at ease when she was away. Before the last illness of Iuri Pavlovitch, which, to tell the truth, was almost his first, Olga Vseslavovna had gone abroad with her daughter, intending to travel for a year; but she had hardly been gone two months when the general unexpectedly determined to go to St. Petersburg to seek a divorce, to see his elder daughter, and change his will. Perhaps he would never have determined on such decisive measures had not something wholly unexpected taken place.