Well, how are you,
Vanya? All right? How's Pavel, Nilovna? What! is Sasha here?"
Lighting a cigarette, she showered questions without waiting for
answers, caressing the mother and the youth with merry glances of
her gray eyes. The mother looked at her and smiled inwardly. "What
good people I'm among!" she thought. She bent over Ivan again and
gave him back his kindness twofold:
"Get well! Now I must give you wine." She rose and walked into
the dining room, where Sofya was saying to Sasha:
"She has three hundred copies prepared already. She'll kill herself
working so hard. There's heroism for you! Unseen, unnoticed, it
finds its reward and its praise in itself. Do you know, Sasha,
it's the greatest happiness to live among such people, to be their
comrade, to work with them?"
"Yes," answered the girl softly.
In the evening at tea Sofya said to the mother:
"Nilovna, you have to go to the village again."
"Well, what of it? When?"
"It would be good if you could go to-morrow. Can you?"
"Yes."
"Ride there," advised Nikolay. "Hire post horses, and please take
a different route from before--across the district of Nikolsk."
Nikolay's somber expression was alarming.
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