story that evening to charm the company, and he was preparing for it even with a certain inspiration. Prince Lev Nikolaevich, listening to this story later, realized that he had never heard anything like such brilliant humor and such wonderful gaiety and naivety, which was almost touching on the lips of such a Don Juan as Prince N. And yet, if he had only known how old and worn out this same story was, how everyone knew it by heart and was sick and tired of it in all drawing rooms, and only at the innocent Epanchins' did it appear again as news, as the sudden, sincere, and brilliant recollection of a brilliant and excellent man! Finally, even the little German poeticule, though he behaved himself with extraordinary courtesy and modesty, almost considered that he, too, was doing this house an honor by visiting it. But the prince did not notice the reverse side, did not notice any lining. This disaster Aglaya had not foreseen. She herself was remarkably beautiful that evening. All three girls were dressed up, though not too magnificently, and even had their hair done in some special way. Aglaya sat with Evgeny Pavlovich, talking and joking with him in an extraordinarily friendly way. Evgeny Pavlovich behaved himself somewhat more solidly, as it were, than at other times, also, perhaps, out of respect for the dignitaries. However, he had long been known in society; he was a familiar man there, though a young man. That evening he came to the Epanchins' with crape on his hat, and Belokonsky praised him for this crape: another society nephew, under the circumstances, might not have worn crape after such an uncle. Lizaveta Prokofyevna was also pleased by it, but generally she seemed somehow too preoccupied. The prince noticed that Aglaya looked at him attentively a couple of times and, it seemed, remained pleased with him. Little by little he was becoming terribly happy. His former "fantastic" thoughts and apprehensions (after his conversation with Lebedev) now seemed to him, in sudden but frequent recollections, such an unrealizable, impossible, and even ridiculous dream! (Even without that, his first, though unconscious, desire and longing all that day had been somehow to make it so as not to believe in that dream!) He spoke little and then only to answer questions, and finally became quite silent, sat and listened, but was clearly drowning in delight. Little by little something like inspiration prepared itself in him, ready to blaze up when the chance came . . . He began speaking by chance, also in answer to a question, and apparently without any special intention . . .

VII

While he gazed delightedly at Aglaya, who was talking gaily with Prince N. and Evgeny Pavlovich, the elderly gentleman Anglophile, who was entertaining the "dignitary" in another corner, animatedly telling him about something, suddenly spoke the name of Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev. The prince quickly turned in their direction and began to listen.

The matter had to do with present-day regulations and some sort of irregularities in the landowners' estates in -------province.

There must also have been something funny in the Anglophile's stories, because the little old man finally began to laugh at the acrimonious verve of the storyteller. Speaking smoothly, drawing out his words somehow peevishly, with a tender emphasis on the vowels, the man told why he had been forced, precisely owing to today's regulations, to sell a magnificent estate of his in ------- province, and even, not being in great need of money, at half price, and at the same time to keep a ruined estate, money-losing and in litigation, and even to spend more on it. "I fled from them to avoid further litigation over Pavlishchev's land. Another one or two inheritances like that and I'm a ruined man. Though I had about ten thousand acres of excellent land coming to me there!"

"You see . . . Ivan Petrovich is a relation of the late Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev . . . you were looking for relations, I believe," Ivan Fyodorovich, who suddenly turned up beside the prince and noticed his extreme attention to the conversation, said to him in a half-whisper. Till then he had been entertaining his superior, the general, but he had long since noticed the exceptional solitude of Lev Nikolaevich and had begun to worry; he wanted to draw him into the conversation to some degree, and thus to show and recommend him for a second time to the "higher persons."

"Lev Nikolaich was Nikolai Andreich Pavlishchev's ward after his parents' death," he put in, having caught Ivan Petrovich's eye.

"De-light-ed," the man remarked, "and I even remember you. Earlier, when Ivan Fyodorych introduced us, I recognized you at once, even your face. You've really changed little externally, though I saw you as a child of about ten or eleven. Something in your features reminded me . . ."

"You saw me as a child?" the prince asked with a sort of extraordinary surprise.

"Oh, a very long time ago," Ivan Petrovich went on, "in Zlatoverkhovo, where you then lived with my cousins. I used to visit Zlatoverkhovo rather often—you don't remember me? Ve-ry possible that you don't. . . You had . . . some sort of illness then, so that I once even wondered about you . . ."

"I don't remember a thing!" the prince confirmed heatedly.

A few more words of explanation, extremely calm on Ivan Petrovich's part and surprisingly excited on the prince's, and it turned out that the two ladies, the old spinsters, relations of the late Pavlishchev, who lived on his estate in Zlatoverkhovo and who were entrusted with the prince's upbringing, were in turn Ivan Petrovich's cousins. Ivan Petrovich, like everyone else, could give almost no explanation of the reasons why Pavlishchev had been so taken up with the little prince, his ward. "I forgot to ask about it then," but all the same it turned out that he had an excellent memory, because he even remembered how strict the elder cousin, Marfa Nikitishna, had been with her little charge, "so that I even quarreled with her once over the system of education, because it was all birching and birching—for a sick child . . . you must agree ... it's . . ."—and, on the contrary, how affectionate the younger cousin, Natalya Nikitishna, had been with the poor boy . . . "The two of them," he explained further, "now live in ------- province (only I don't know if they're still alive), where Pavlishchev left them a quite, quite decent little estate. Marfa Nikitishna, I believe, wanted to enter a convent; though I won't insist on that; maybe I heard it about somebody else . . . yes, I heard it about a doctor's widow the other day . . ."

The prince listened to this with eyes shining with rapture and tenderness. He declared in his turn, with extraordinary ardor, that he would never forgive himself for not finding an opportunity, during those six months of traveling in the provinces, to locate and visit his former guardians. "He had wanted to go every day and kept being distracted by circumstances . . . but now he promised himself . . . without fail . . . even to------province ... So you know Natalia Nikitishna? What a beautiful, what a saintly soul! But Marfa Nikitishna, too . . . forgive me, but I believe you're mistaken about Marfa Nikitishna! She was strict, but ... it was impossible not to lose patience . . . with such an idiot as I was then (hee, hee!). For I was quite an idiot then, you wouldn't believe it

(ha, ha!). However . . . however, you saw me then and . . . How is it I don't remember you, pray tell? So you . . . ah, my God, so you're really Nikolai Andreich Pavlishchev's relation?"