the sofa, and guilelessly dropped asleep on the spot.
'You're a little pale to-day,' Nenila Makarievna said to her daughter, on the evening of the same day. 'Are you quite well?'
'Yes, mamma.'
Nenila Makarievna set straight the kerchief on the girl's neck.
'You are very pale; look at me,' she went on, with that motherly solicitude in which there is none the less audible a note of parental authority: 'there, now, your eyes look heavy too. You're not well, Masha.'
'My head does ache a little,' said Masha, to find some way of escape.
'There, I knew it.' Nenila Makarievna put some scent on Masha's forehead. 'You're not feverish, though.'
Masha stooped down, and picked a thread off the floor.
Nenila Makarievna's arms lay softly round Masha's slender waist.
'It seems to me you have something you want to tell me,' she said caressingly, not loosing her hands.
Masha shuddered inwardly.
'I? Oh, no, mamma.'
Masha's momentary confusion did not escape her mother's attention.
'Oh, yes, you do.... Think a little.'
