tender letter, in which he had asked her forgiveness.  Without giving any explanations, he said that he had received indubitable proofs of the innocence and chivalrous honor of her husband; that he felt himself deeply guilty toward him, and was miserable on account of the injustice he had committed.  In the following letters, praying his daughter to hasten her coming, because he was dangerously ill, and the doctors thought could not last long, he filled her with 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 tutor and teacher, and loved him sincerely.  The boy had already reached the highest class at school, when his sister, two years older than he, finished her schooling, and returned to her father’s house, about the time of the general’s second marriage.  What the young tutor tried not to notice and to endure, for love of his pupil, in the first year of the general’s second marriage, became intolerable when the general’s daughter returned home, and to all the burden of his difficult position was added the knowledge of their mutual love.  He proceeded frankly, and the whole matter was soon settled.  But the young man had never uttered a syllable as to the cause of Madame Nazimoff’s hatred for him.  For the sake of his father-in-law’s peace of mind, he sincerely hoped that he would never know.  Anna was convinced that the whole cause of her step-mother’s hostility was her prejudice against what was in her opinion a mesalliance.  In part she was right, but the chief reason of this hostility remained forever a secret to her.  Unfortunately, it was not equally a secret to her father.