Page:The Bet and Other Stories.djvu/58

46 with my money. I loved you as a father and as my only friend. Forgive me."

So it appeared that he too belonged to the horde of savages. Later on, I gathered from various hints, that there was an attempt at suicide. Apparently, Katy tried to poison herself. I think she must have been seriously ill afterwards, for I got the following letter from Yalta, where most probably the doctors had sent her. Her last letter to me contained a request that I should send her at Yalta a thousand roubles, and it ended with the words: "Forgive me for writing such a sad letter. I buried my baby yesterday." After she had spent about a year in the Crimea she returned home.

She had been travelling for about four years, and during these four years I confess that I occupied a strange and unenviable position in regard to her. When she announced to me that she was going on to the stage and afterwards wrote to me about her love; when the desire to spend took hold of her, as it did periodically, and I had to send her every now and then one or two thousand roubles at her request; when she wrote that she intended to die, and afterwards that her baby was dead, I was at a loss every time. All my sympathy with her fate consisted in thinking hard and writing long tedious letters which might as well never have been written. But then I was in loco parentis and I loved her as a daughter.

Katy lives half a mile away from me now.