A beautiful spring day was drawing to a close. High aloft in the clear
sky floated small rosy clouds, which seemed never to drift past, but
to be slowly absorbed into the blue depths beyond.

At an open window, in a handsome mansion situated in one of the
outlying streets of O., the chief town of the government of that
name--it was in the year 1842--there were sitting two ladies, the one
about fifty years old, the other an old woman of seventy.

The name of the first was Maria Dmitrievna Kalitine. Her husband, who
had formerly occupied the post of Provincial Procurator, and who was
well known in his day as a good man of business--a man of bilious
temperament, confident, resolute, and enterprising--had been dead
ten years. He had received a good education, and had studied at the
university, but as the family from which he sprang was a poor one, he
had early recognized the necessity of making a career for himself and
of gaining money.

Maria Dmitrievna married him for love. He was good-looking, he had
plenty of sense, and, when he liked, he could be very agreeable. Maria
Dmitrievna, whose maiden name was Pestof, lost her parents while she
was still a child. She spent several years in an Institute at Moscow,
and then went to live with her brother and one of her aunts at
Pokrovskoe, a family estate situated fifteen versts from O. Soon
afterwards her brother was called away on duty to St. Petersburgh, and,
until a sudden death put an end to his career, he kept his aunt and
sister with only just enough for them to live upon. Maria Dmitrievna
inherited Pokrovskoe, but she did not long reside there. In the second
year of her marriage with Kalitine, who had succeeded at the end of