unfamiliar note in her voice again.

"A quarter to six," answered the midwife.

"And what if I really am dying?" thought Olga Mihalovna, looking
at her husband's head and the window-panes on which the rain was
beating. "How will he live without me? With whom will he have tea
and dinner, talk in the evenings, sleep?"

And he seemed to her like a forlorn child; she felt sorry for him
and wanted to say something nice, caressing and consolatory. She
remembered how in the spring he had meant to buy himself some
harriers, and she, thinking it a cruel and dangerous sport, had
prevented him from doing it.

"Pyotr, buy yourself harriers," she moaned.

He dropped the blind and went up to the bed, and would have said
something; but at that moment the pain came back, and Olga Mihalovna
uttered an unseemly, piercing scream.

The pain and the constant screaming and moaning stupefied her. She
heard, saw, and sometimes spoke, but hardly understood anything,
and was only conscious that she was in pain or was just going to
be in pain. It seemed to her that the nameday party had been long,
long ago--not yesterday, but a year ago perhaps; and that her new
life of agony had lasted longer than her childhood, her school-days,
her time at the University, and her marriage, and would go on for
a long, long time, endlessly. She saw them bring tea to the midwife,
and summon her at midday to lunch and afterwards to dinner; she saw