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"God have mercy upon us, what we have to put up with with this girl!" said Sisoy, aloud, getting angry. "Spoilt child! Sit quiet!" The bishop remembered the perfectly new white church in which he had conducted the services while living abroad, he remembered the sound of the warm sea. In his flat he had five lofty light rooms; in his study he had a new writing-table, lots of books.

The only person who behaved freely with him and said what he meant was old Sisoy, who had spent his whole life in the presence of bishops and had outlived eleven of them. And so the bishop was at ease with him, although, of course, he was a tedious and nonsensical man.

I bought a candle to-day; I wanted to rub you with tallow." "I am in a fever . . ." said the bishop, and he sat up. "I really ought to have something. My head is bad. . . ." Sisoy took off the bishop's shirt and began rubbing his chest and back with tallow. "That's the way . . . that's the way . . ." he said. "Lord Jesus Christ . . . that's the way.

When he returned from church, he hurriedly said his prayers, got into bed, and wrapped himself up as warm as possible. It was disagreeable to remember the fish he had eaten at dinner. The moonlight worried him, and then he heard talking. In an adjoining room, probably in the parlour, Father Sisoy was talking politics: "There's war among the Japanese now. They are fighting.

He had come to the Pankratievsky Monastery three days before, and the bishop had kept him that he might talk to him at his leisure about matters of business, about the arrangements here. . . . At half-past one they began ringing for matins. Father Sisoy could be heard coughing, muttering something in a discontented voice, then he got up and walked barefoot about the rooms.

Sisoy stood a little and yawned. "O Lord, forgive me, a sinner." "They had the electric lights on at Erakin's today," he said; "I don't like it!" Father Sisoy was old, lean, bent, always dissatisfied with something, and his eyes were angry-looking and prominent as a crab's. "I don't like it," he said, going away. "I don't like it. Bother it!"

For a long while he heard footsteps in the next room and could not tell whose they were. At last the door opened, and Sisoy came in with a candle and a tea-cup in his hand. "You are in bed already, your holiness?" he asked. "Here I have come to rub you with spirit and vinegar. A thorough rubbing does a great deal of good.

But eight years had passed and he had been called back to Russia, and now he was a suffragan bishop, and all the past had retreated far away into the mist as though it were a dream. . . . Father Sisoy came into the bedroom with a candle. "I say!" he said, wondering, "are you asleep already, your holiness?" "What is it?" "Why, it's still early, ten o'clock or less.

Lord Jesus Christ! . . . That's the way . . . that's the way. . . . I've just been in our monastery. . . . I don't like it. I'm going away from here to-morrow, your holiness; I don't want to stay longer. Lord Jesus Christ. . . . That's the way. . . ." Sisoy could never stay long in the same place, and he felt as though he had been a whole year in the Pankratievsky Monastery.

He shut his eyes and seemed to sleep, but twice heard the clock strike and Father Sisoy coughing the other side of the wall. And once more his mother came in and looked timidly at him for a minute. Someone drove up to the steps, as he could hear, in a coach or in a chaise. Suddenly a knock, the door slammed, the lay brother came into the bedroom. "Your holiness," he called. "Well?"