Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/48

 and proper," said the doctor. "Further things will be disclosed in the investigation."

And the doctor made a bow.

Iván Ilích went out slowly, gloomily seated himself in the sleigh, and drove home. All the way he continued analyzing everything which the doctor had said, trying to translate all those mixed, obscure scientific terms into simple language, and to read in them an answer to the question, "Am I in bad shape, in very bad shape, or is it still all right?" And it seemed to him that the meaning of everything said by the doctor was that he was in bad shape. Everything in the streets appeared sad to Iván Ilích. The drivers were sad, the houses were sad, the passers-by, the shops were sad. But this pain, this dull, grinding pain, which did not leave him for a minute, seemed, in connection with the doctor's obscure words, to receive another, a more serious meaning. Iván Ilích now watched it with another, a heavy feeling.

He came home and began to tell his wife about it. His wife listened to him, but in the middle of the conversation his daughter entered, with a hat on her head; she was getting ready to drive out with her mother. She made an effort to sit down and listen to all that tiresome talk, but did not hold out, and her mother, too, did not stop to hear the end of it.

"Well, I am very glad," said his wife. "So now, be sure and take the medicine regularly. Give me the recipe,—I will send Gerásim to the apothecary's."

And she went out to get dressed.

He did not dare to draw breath while she was in the room, but when she left, he heaved a deep sigh.

"Well," he said, "maybe it is, indeed, all right yet.”

He began to take medicine, to carry out the doctor's prescriptions, which were changed in consequence of the urine investigation. But here it somehow happened that in this investigation and in what was to follow after it