In earlier days she would have said to him, "Do by all means," or,
"I see you want to turn me into a cook"; but now she only looked
at him timidly and flushed crimson.

"Well, how do you feel to-day?" he asked kindly.

"I am all right to-day. There is nothing but a little weakness."

"You must take care of yourself, darling. I am awfully anxious about
you."

Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was ill in some way. Samoylenko said she had
intermittent fever, and gave her quinine; the other doctor,
Ustimovitch, a tall, lean, unsociable man, who used to sit at home
in the daytime, and in the evenings walk slowly up and down on the
sea-front coughing, with his hands folded behind him and a cane
stretched along his back, was of opinion that she had a female
complaint, and prescribed warm compresses. In old days, when Laevsky
loved her, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna's illness had excited his pity and
terror; now he saw falsity even in her illness. Her yellow, sleepy
face, her lustreless eyes, her apathetic expression, and the yawning
that always followed her attacks of fever, and the fact that during
them she lay under a shawl and looked more like a boy than a woman,
and that it was close and stuffy in her room--all this, in his
opinion, destroyed the illusion and was an argument against love
and marriage.

The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while
Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with