the window.

"Prenez garde, prenez garde," Marya Dmitrievna kept repeating.

"Lenotchka, pat him," said the young man, "I won't let him be perverse."

The little girl again stretched out her hand and timidly patted the
quivering nostrils of the horse, who kept fidgeting and champing the
bit.

"Bravo!" cried Marya Dmitrievna, "but now get off and come in to us."

The rider adroitly turned his horse, gave him a touch of the spur, and
galloping down the street soon reached the courtyard. A minute later he
ran into the drawing-room by the door from the hall, flourishing his
whip; at the same moment there appeared in the other doorway a tall,
slender dark-haired girl of nineteen, Marya Dmitrievna's eldest
daughter, Lisa.



Chapter IV


The name of the young man whom we have just introduced to the reader was
Vladimir Nikolaitch Panshin. He served in Petersburg on special
commissions in the department of internal affairs. He had come to the
town of O---- to carry out some temporary government commissions, and
was in attendance on the Governor-General Zonnenberg, to whom he
happened to be distantly related. Panshin's father, a retired cavalry