"What is going on there?" he asked. "What are you mumbling about, Edouard Vicentevitch? Tell me what is the matter? Is it my daughter?"
"Your excellency, I beg of you to take care of yourself!" the doctor was beginning, evidently quite familiar with the general's family affairs, and therefore dreading the meeting of husband and wife. "It is not Anna Iurievna. . . ."
"Aha!" the sick man interrupted him; "she has come? Very well. Let her come in. Only the little one . . . I don't wish her to come . . . to-day."
Suffering was visible in his eyes, this time not bodily suffering.
The door opened, with the rustling of a silk dress. A tall, well- developed, and decidedly handsome woman appeared on the threshhold. She glanced at the pain-stricken face, which smiled contemptuously toward her. In a moment she was beside the general, kneeling beside him on the carpet, bending close to him, and pressing his hand, as she repeated in a despairing whisper:
"Oh, Georges! Georges! Is it really you, my poor friend?"
It would be hard to define the expression of rapidly changing emotions which passed over the sick man's face, which made his breast heave, and his great heart quiver and tremble painfully. Displeasure and pity, sympathy and contempt, anger and grief, all were expressed in the short, sharp, bitter laugh, and the few words which escaped his lips when he saw his little daughter timidly following her mother into his room.
"Do not teach her to lie!" and he nodded toward the child, and turned toward the wall, with an expression of pain and pity on his face. The lawyer and the priest hastened to take their leave and disappear.
"Ah! Sinners! sinners!" muttered the latter, as he descended the stairs.
"Things are not in good shape between them?" asked Lobnitchenko.
"They don't get on well together?"