"Haven't you seen Mashutka?"
"N—No."
"Ah! you—you ought to have gone to see her long ago."
"I forgot. I can't remember everything."
"You must remember with your heart."
Lunev was embarrassed and said nothing. A little man on crutches wearing a moustache with pointed ends, hobbled in out of the corridor, and said in a hoarse, hissing voice to the tall man with the bandaged head:
"Schurka has not come again, the rascal."
Jakov looked at him, sighed and threw his head backwards and forwards on the pillow restlessly.
"Nikita Jegarovitch will die, and he doesn't want to,—the surgeon told me, he must die, and I want to die, and I can't. I shall get well again and go behind the counter, and drink brandy and so I go down."
His lips lengthened into a melancholy smile.