astonishment by expressing his intention to make a new will, and
his determination to separate his youngest daughter "from such a
mother," and by his prayers to her and her husband not to refuse to
take upon themselves little Olga's education.

"What had happened? How could that light-minded woman have so
deeply wounded my father?" Anna asked in bewilderment.

"If she was merely light-minded!" her husband answered, shrugging
his shoulders. "But she is so malicious, so crafty, and so daring
that anything may be expected from her."

"But in that case there would be an open scandal. We would know
something for certain. Nowadays they even relate such stories in
the newspapers, and my father is so well known, so noteworthy!"

"That is just why they don't write about him!" answered Borisoff,
her husband, smiling. He himself flatly refused to go to St.
Petersburg. With horror he remembered the first year of his
marriage, before he had succeeded in obtaining a transfer to
another city, and was compelled to meet the woman he detested;
compelled also to meet his father-in-law, a wise and honorable old
man, who had fallen so completely into the toils of this crafty
woman. Anna Iurievna knew that her husband despised her
stepmother; that he detested her as the cause of all the grief
which they had had to endure through her, and most of all, on
account of the injustice she was guilty of toward her brother, the
general's son.

For six years Borisoff had lived with young Peter Nazimoff, as his