To look at her was a treat. You did n't want anything else. How I envied her--sinner that I was!"

"Singers and dancers are the greatest people in the world," said Nyanya Eugenia gravely, and she began to sing something about King David, while Uncle Jaakov, embracing Tsiganok, said to him:

"You ought to dance in the wineshops. You would turn people's heads."

"I wish I could sing!" complained Tsiganok. "If God had given me a voice I should have been singing ten years by now, and should have gone on singing if only as a monk."

They all drank vodka, and Gregory drank an extra lot. As she poured out glass after glass for him, grandmother warned him:

"Take care, Grisha, or you 'll become quite blind."

"I don't care! I 've no more use for my eyesight," he replied firmly.

He drank, but he did not get tipsy, only becoming more loquacious every moment; and he spoke to me about my father nearly all the time.

"A man with a large heart was my friend Maxim Savatyevitch . . ."

Grandmother sighed as she corroborated:

"Yes, indeed he was--a true child of God."

All this was extremely interesting, and held me spellbound, and filled my heart with a tender, not unpleasant sadness. For sadness and gladness live within us side by side, almost inseparable; the one succeeding the other with an elusive, unappreciable swiftness.

Once Uncle Jaakov, being rather tipsy, began to rend his shirt, and to clutch furiously at his curly hair, his grizzled mustache, his nose and his pendulous lip.

"What am I?" he howled, dissolved in tears. "Why am I here?" And striking himself on the cheek, forehead and chest, he sobbed: "Worthless, degraded creature! Lost soul!"

"A--ah! You 're right!" growled Gregory.

But grandmother, who was also not quite sober, said to her son, catching hold of his hand:

"That will do, Jaasha. God knows how to teach us."

When she had been drinking, she was even more attractive; her eyes grew darker and smiled, shedding the warmth of her heart upon every one. Brushing aside the handkerchief which made her face too hot, she would say in a tipsy voice:

"Lord! Lord! How good everything is! Don't you see how good everything is?"

And this was a cry from her heart--the watchword of her whole life.

I was much impressed by the tears and cries of my happy-go-lucky uncle, and I asked grandmother why he cried and scolded and beat himself so.

"You want to know everything!" she said reluctantly, quite unlike her usual manner. "But wait a bit. You will be enlightened about this affair quite soon enough."

My curiosity was still more excited by this, and I went to the workshop and attacked Ivan on the subject, but he would not answer me. He just laughed quietly with a sidelong glance at Gregory, and hustled me out, crying:

"Give over now, and run away. If you don't I 'll put you in the vat and dye you."

Gregory, standing before the broad, low stove, with vats cemented to it, stirred them with a long black

V poker, lifting it up now and again to see the colored drops fall from its end. The brightly burning flames played on the skin-apron, multi-colored like the chasuble of a priest, which he wore. The dye simmered in the vats; an acrid vapor extended in a thick cloud to the door. Gregory glanced at me from under his glasses, with his clouded, bloodshot eyes, and said abruptly to Ivan:

"You are wanted in the yard. Can't you see?"

But when Tsiganok had gone into the yard, Gregory, sitting on a sack of santaline, beckoned me to him.

"Come here!"

Drawing me on to his knee, and rubbing his warm, soft beard against my cheek, he said in a tone of reminiscence:

"Your uncle beat and tortured his wife to death, and now his conscience pricks him. Do you understand? You want to understand everything, you see, and so you get muddled."

Gregory was as simple as grandmother, but his words were disconcerting, and he seemed to look through and through every one.

"How did he kill her?" he went on in a leisurely tone. "Why, like this. He was lying in bed with her, and he threw the counterpane over her head, and held it down while he beat her. Why? He doesn't know himself why he did it."

And paying no attention to Ivan, who, having returned with an armful of goods from the yard, was squatting before the fire, warming his hands, the head workman suggested:

"Perhaps it was because she was better than he was, and he was envious of her. The Kashmirins do not like good people, my boy. They are jealous of them. They cannot stand them, and try to get them out of the way. Ask your grandmother how they got rid of your father. She will tell you everything; she hates deceit, because she does not understand it. She may be reckoned among the saints, although she drinks wine and takes snuff.