The table stood just between the two windows, and three people sat down to it; Grigori, Matrona, and a companion of the latter, a tall, thin, middle-aged person, with a pock-marked face and good-tempered grey eyes. She was called Felizata Jegorovna, and she was a spinster and the daughter of a college superintendent She could not drink the tea provided by the Infirmary, and so used her own samovar. All this she told Orloff in an excited cracked voice; she invited him hospitably to take a seat near the window, and to refresh himself with the "magnificent air of Heaven," whilst she disappeared somewhere for a time. "Well, were you very tired yesterday?" Orloff asked his wife. "I should rather think so," Matrona replied in a lively tone of voice. "I could scarcely feel my legs under me, and my head was swimming. I moved about at last as if I were half dead, and could scarcely hold on till I was released from duty.... I was praying all the time to the Lord that He would be merciful to us." "How is it, then? Don't you feel afraid here?" "What, of the sick people?" "Of the sick people ... or of anything else...." "I am only afraid of the dead.... Do you know," ... she bent down towards him and whispered in a scared voice--"they still move after they are dead ... it's true, on my soul!" "I know that ... I have seen it myself!" Grigori continued with an ironical laugh--"The police-officer Nazaroff nearly gave me a box on the ear as he lay on the stretcher. I was carrying him to the mortuary, and all of a sudden he let out with his left hand.... I only just escaped it ... it's true!" Grischka was in the best of tempers. Taking his tea in this bright clean room, from which could be seen endless distances of green fields and blue sky, pleased him immensely. And there was something else too which caused him pleasure--something which radiated, as it were, from his own personality. He felt the desire to show the best side of his character, and at the same time to appear in Matronal eyes as the hero of the hour. "I shall make this my life work.... Heaven itself shall rejoice at it! I have my own special reasons for doing so.... The people here, I tell you, are such as one seldom meets in the world...." He told her now of his conversation with the doctor, and whilst he unconsciously exaggerated a little, he worked himself into a still pleasanter frame of mind.