Lizaveta Ivanovna has married a very amiable young man, a son of the former steward of the old Countess.  He is in the service of the State somewhere, and is in receipt of a good income.  Lizaveta is also supporting a poor relative.

Tomsky has been promoted to the rank of captain, and has become the husband of the Princess Pauline.

FOOTNOTES OF THE QUEEN OF SPADES: 

[1:  Said of a card when it wins or loses in the quickest possible time.]

[2:  Diminutive of Lizaveta (Elizabeth).]

VERA JELIHOVSKY

THE GENERAL’S WILL

I

It happened in winter, just before the holidays.  Ivan Feodorovitch Lobnitchenko, the lawyer, whose office is in one of the main streets of St. Petersburg, was called hurriedly to witness the last will and testament of one at the point of death.  The sick man was not strictly a client of Ivan Feodorovitch; under other circumstances, he might have refused to make this late call, after a day’s heavy toil ... but the dying man was an aristocrat and a millionaire, and such as he meet no refusals, whether in life, or, much more, at the moment of death.

Lobnitchenko, taking a secretary and everything necessary, with a sigh scratched himself behind the ear, and thrusting aside the thought of the delightful evening at cards that awaited him, set out to go to the sick man.

General Iuri Pavlovitch Nasimoff was far gone.  Even the most compassionate doctors did not give him many days to live, when he finally decided to destroy the will which he had made long ago, not in St. Petersburg, but in the provincial city where he had played the Tsar for so many years.  The general had come to the capital for a time, and had lain down—­to rise no more.

This was the opinion of the physicians, and of most of those about him; the sick man himself was unwilling to admit it.  He was a stalwart-hearted and until recently a stalwart-bodied old man, tall, striking, with an energetic face, and a piercing, masterful glance, hard to forget, even if you saw him only once.

He was lying on the sofa, in a richly furnished hotel suite, consisting of three of the best rooms.  He received the lawyer gayly enough.  He himself explained the circumstances to him, though every now and then compelled to stop by a paroxysm of pain, with difficulty repressing the groans which almost escaped him, in spite of all his efforts.  During these heavy moments, Ivan Feodorovitch raised his eyes buried in fat to the sick man’s face, and his plump little features were convulsed in sympathy with the sufferer’s pain.  As soon as the courageous old man, fighting hard with the paroxysms of pain, had got the better of them, taking his hands from his contorted face, and drawing a painful breath, he began anew to explain his will.  Lobnitchenko dropped his eyes again and became all attention.