With that I went out, not forgetting to take the revolver, and made
my way to the chemist's. But I ought not to have gone away. When I
came back from the chemist's, Vassilyev lay on the sofa fainting.
The bandages had been roughly torn off, and blood was flowing from
the reopened wound. It was daylight before I succeeded in restoring
him to consciousness. He was raving in delirium, shivering, and
looking with unseeing eyes about the room till morning had come,
and we heard the booming voice of the priest as he read the service
over the dead.

When Vassilyev's rooms were crowded with old women and mutes, when
the coffin had been moved and carried out of the yard, I advised
him to remain at home. But he would not obey me, in spite of the
pain and the grey, rainy morning. He walked bareheaded and in silence
behind the coffin all the way to the cemetery, hardly able to move
one leg after the other, and from time to time clutching convulsively
at his wounded side. His face expressed complete apathy. Only once
when I roused him from his lethargy by some insignificant question
he shifted his eyes over the pavement and the grey fence, and for
a moment there was a gleam of gloomy anger in them.

"'Weelright,'" he read on a signboard. "Ignorant, illiterate
people, devil take them!"

I led him home from the cemetery.

----

Only one year has passed since that night, and Vassilyev has hardly
had time to wear out the boots in which he tramped through the mud