He was only twice at the Turkins' in the course of the four years
after Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone away, on each occasion at the
invitation of Vera Iosifovna, who was still undergoing treatment
for migraine. Every summer Ekaterina Ivanovna came to stay with her
parents, but he did not once see her; it somehow never happened.

But now four years had passed. One still, warm morning a letter was
brought to the hospital. Vera Iosifovna wrote to Dmitri Ionitch
that she was missing him very much, and begged him to come and see
them, and to relieve her sufferings; and, by the way, it was her
birthday. Below was a postscript: "I join in mother's request.--
K."

Startsev considered, and in the evening he went to the Turkins'.

"How do you do, if you please?" Ivan Petrovitch met him, smiling
with his eyes only. "Bongjour."

Vera Iosifovna, white-haired and looking much older, shook Startsev's
hand, sighed affectedly, and said:

"You don't care to pay attentions to me, doctor. You never come and
see us; I am too old for you. But now some one young has come;
perhaps she will be more fortunate."

And Kitten? She had grown thinner, paler, had grown handsomer and
more graceful; but now she was Ekaterina Ivanovna, not Kitten; she
had lost the freshness and look of childish naïveté. And in her
expression and manners there was something new--guilty and
diffident, as though she did not feel herself at home here in the