Sisoi came in dressed in a white cassock, carrying a candle in his hand.
“I can’t go to sleep,” his Reverence said. “I must be ill. I don’t know what the matter is; I have fever.”
“You have caught cold, your Lordship. I must rub you with tallow.”
Father Sisoi stood looking at him for a while and yawned: “Ah-h—the Lord have mercy on us!”
“Erakin has electricity in his store now—I hate it!” he continued.
Father Sisoi was aged, and round-shouldered, and gaunt. He was always displeased with something or other, and his eyes, which protruded like those of a crab, always wore an angry expression.
“I don’t like it at all,” he repeated—“I hate it.”
II
Next day, on Palm Sunday, his Reverence officiated at the cathedral in the city. Then he went to the diocesan bishop’s, then to see a general’s wife who was very ill, and at last he drove home. At two o’clock two beloved guests were having dinner with him, his aged mother, and his little niece Kitty, a child of eight. The spring sun was peeping cheerily in through the windows as they sat at their meal, and was shining merrily on the white tablecloth, and on Kitty’s red hair. Through the double panes they heard the rooks cawing, and the magpies chattering in the garden.
“It is nine years since I saw you last,” said the old mother, “and yet when I caught sight of you in the convent chapel yesterday I thought to myself: God bless me, he has not changed a bit! Only perhaps you are a little thinner than you were, and your beard has grown longer. Oh, holy Mother, Queen of Heaven! Everybody was crying yesterday. As soon as I saw you, I began to cry myself, I don’t know why. His holy will be done!”