Alexandritch's old top-hat. When there were a sufficient heap of
notes, Kostya, who acted the part of postman, walked round the table
and delivered them. The deacon, Katya, and Kostya, who received
amusing notes and tried to write as funnily as they could, were
highly delighted.

"We must have a little talk," Nadyezhda Fyodorovna read in a little
note; she glanced at Marya Konstantinovna, who gave her an almond-oily
smile and nodded.

"Talk of what?" thought Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. "If one can't tell
the whole, it's no use talking."

Before going out for the evening she had tied Laevsky's cravat for
him, and that simple action filled her soul with tenderness and
sorrow. The anxiety in his face, his absent-minded looks, his pallor,
and the incomprehensible change that had taken place in him of late,
and the fact that she had a terrible revolting secret from him, and
the fact that her hands trembled when she tied his cravat--all
this seemed to tell her that they had not long left to be together.
She looked at him as though he were an ikon, with terror and
penitence, and thought: "Forgive, forgive."

Opposite her was sitting Atchmianov, and he never took his black,
love-sick eyes off her. She was stirred by passion; she was ashamed
of herself, and afraid that even her misery and sorrow would not
prevent her from yielding to impure desire to-morrow, if not to-day
--and that, like a drunkard, she would not have the strength to
stop herself.