“Why, whatever’s the matter with you? you’re clean out of countenance!”[21] say the girls.
“How am I likely to be cheerful? Yesterday my father died, and to-day my mother.”
“Poor thing! Poor unhappy girl!” they all exclaim sympathizingly.
Well, the time came to say good-bye. “See me off, Marusia,” says the Fiend. So she went out to see him off.
“Tell me; were you in the church?”
“No.”
“And saw what I was doing?”
“No.”
“Very well! To-morrow evening you will die yourself!”
Marusia spent the night with her friends; in the morning she got up and considered what she should do. She bethought herself that she had a grandmother—an old, very old woman, who had become blind from length of years. “Suppose I go and ask her advice,” she said, and then went off to her grandmother’s.