hand was moist. He walked away from the window and with dim eyes
looked round the room in which he still seemed to hear the timid
droning voice. He glanced at the table. Luckily, Father Yakov, in
his haste, had forgotten to take the sermons. Kunin rushed up to
them, tore them into pieces, and with loathing thrust them under
the table.

"And I did not know!" he moaned, sinking on to the sofa. "After
being here over a year as member of the Rural Board, Honorary Justice
of the Peace, member of the School Committee! Blind puppet, egregious
idiot! I must make haste and help them, I must make haste!"

He turned from side to side uneasily, pressed his temples and racked
his brains.

"On the twentieth I shall get my salary, two hundred roubles. . . .
On some good pretext I will give him some, and some to the doctor's
wife. . . . I will ask them to perform a special service here, and
will get up an illness for the doctor. . . . In that way I shan't
wound their pride. And I'll help Father Avraamy too. . . ."

He reckoned his money on his fingers, and was afraid to own to
himself that those two hundred roubles would hardly be enough for
him to pay his steward, his servants, the peasant who brought the
meat. . . . He could not help remembering the recent past when he
was senselessly squandering his father's fortune, when as a puppy
of twenty he had given expensive fans to prostitutes, had paid ten
roubles a day to Kuzma, his cab-driver, and in his vanity had made
presents to actresses. Oh, how useful those wasted rouble, three-rouble,
ten-rouble notes would have been now!