the rooks and the notes of the starlings in the garden.

"It is nine years since we have met," said the old lady. "And when
I looked at you in the monastery yesterday, good Lord! you've not
changed a bit, except maybe you are thinner and your beard is a
little longer. Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven! Yesterday at the evening
service no one could help crying. I, too, as I looked at you,
suddenly began crying, though I couldn't say why. His Holy Will!"

And in spite of the affectionate tone in which she said this, he
could see she was constrained as though she were uncertain whether
to address him formally or familiarly, to laugh or not, and that
she felt herself more a deacon's widow than his mother. And Katya
gazed without blinking at her uncle, his holiness, as though trying
to discover what sort of a person he was. Her hair sprang up from
under the comb and the velvet ribbon and stood out like a halo; she
had a turned-up nose and sly eyes. The child had broken a glass
before sitting down to dinner, and now her grandmother, as she
talked, moved away from Katya first a wineglass and then a tumbler.
The bishop listened to his mother and remembered how many, many
years ago she used to take him and his brothers and sisters to
relations whom she considered rich; in those days she was taken up
with the care of her children, now with her grandchildren, and she
had brought Katya. . . .

"Your sister, Varenka, has four children," she told him; "Katya,
here, is the eldest. And your brother-in-law Father Ivan fell sick,
God knows of what, and died three days before the Assumption; and
my poor Varenka is left a beggar."