Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/245

Rh not one was to be seen further back─on that point Fomushka was silent.

'And you know that it is I', he added after a brief pause, with a modest smile.

'What!' exclaimed Nezhdanov, 'did you hunt?'

'I did but not for long. Once the horse threw me at full gallop, and I injured my "kurpy," so Fimushka was frightened and so she wouldn't let me. I have given it up ever since.'

'What did you injure?' inquired Nezhdanov.

'The kurpy,' repeated Fomushka, dropping his voice.

His guests looked at one another. No one knew what sort of thing a kurpy might be; at least, Markelov knew that the shaggy tuft on a Cossack or Circassian cap is called a kurpy, but surely Fomushka could not have injured that! But to ask him exactly what he understood by the word was more than any one could make up his mind to do.

'Well, new, since you've shown off,' Fimushka observed suddenly, 'I will show off, too.'

Out of a diminutive 'bonheur du jour,' as they used to call the old-fashioned bureau on tiny crooked legs, with a convex lid which folded up into the back of the bureau, she took a water-colour miniature in an oval bronze