towards the town where all the windows facing west were like
glittering gold because the sun was setting.

After that, whenever my sister was coming to see me Blagovo turned
up too, and they always greeted each other as though their meeting
in my room was accidental. My sister listened while the doctor and
I argued, and at such times her expression was joyfully enthusiastic,
full of tenderness and curiosity, and it seemed to me that a new
world she had never dreamed of before, and which she was now striving
to fathom, was gradually opening before her eyes. When the doctor
was not there she was quiet and sad, and now if she sometimes shed
tears as she sat on my bed it was for reasons of which she did not
speak.

In August Radish ordered us to be ready to go to the railway-line.
Two days before we were "banished" from the town my father came to
see me. He sat down and in a leisurely way, without looking at me,
wiped his red face, then took out of his pocket our town _Messenger_,
and deliberately, with emphasis on each word, read out the news
that the son of the branch manager of the State Bank, a young man
of my age, had been appointed head of a Department in the Exchequer.

"And now look at you," he said, folding up the newspaper, "a beggar,
in rags, good for nothing! Even working-class people and peasants
obtain education in order to become men, while you, a Poloznev,
with ancestors of rank and distinction, aspire to the gutter! But
I have not come here to talk to you; I have washed my hands of you
--" he added in a stifled voice, getting up. "I have come to find
out where your sister is, you worthless fellow. She left home after
dinner, and here it is nearly eight and she is not back. She has