Page:The Kiss and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhoff, 1908.pdf/155

 VI

Apparently about the middle of winter Duimoff first suspected his wife's unfaithfulness. He behaved as if his own conscience reproached him. He no longer looked her straight in the face; no longer smiled radiantly when she came in sight; and, to avoid being alone with her, often brought home to dinner his colleague, Korosteleff, a little short-haired man, with a crushed face, who showed his confusion in Olga Ivanovna's society by buttoning and unbuttoning his coat and pinching his right moustache. During dinner the doctors said that when the diaphragm rises abnormally high the heart sometimes beats irregularly, that neuritis had greatly increased, and they discussed DuimoflTs discovery made during dissection that a case of cancer of the pancreas had been wrongly diagnosed as “malignant anæmia.” And it was plain that both men spoke only of medicine in order that Olga Ivanovna might be silent and tell no lies. After dinner, Korosteleff sat at the piano, and Duimoff sighed and said to him —

“Akh, brother! Well! Play me something mournful.”

Whereupon, raising his shoulders and spreading his hands, Korosteleff strummed a few chords and sang in tenor, “Show me but one spot where Russia's