man in confusion. "I beg your pardon. We pay with our money and the young lady with hers. Good-morning!" "Good-morning," answered the schoolmistress. "And we thank you most feelingly." 

Marya Vassilyevna drank her tea with satisfaction, and she, too, began turning red like the peasants, and fell to thinking again about firewood, about the watchman.... "Stay, old man," she heard from the next table, "it's the schoolmistress from Vyazovye.... We know her; she's a good young lady." "She's all right!" The swing-door was continually banging, some coming in, others going out. Marya Vassilyevna sat on, thinking all the time of the same things, while the concertina went on playing and playing. The patches of sunshine had been on the floor, then they passed to the counter, to the wall, and disappeared altogether; so by the sun it was past midday. 

The peasants at the next table were getting ready to go. The little man, somewhat unsteadily, went up to Marya Vassilyevna and held out his hand to her; following his example, the others shook hands, too, at parting, and went out one after another, and the swing-door squeaked and slammed nine times. "Vassilyevna, get ready," Semyon called to her. They set off. And again they went at a walking pace. "A little while back they were building a school here in their Nizhneye Gorodistche," said Semyon, turning round. "It was a wicked thing that was done!" 

"Why, what?" "They say the president put a thousand in his pocket, and the school guardian another thousand in his, and the teacher five hundred." "The whole school only cost a thousand. It's wrong to slander people, grandfather. That's all nonsense." "I don't know,... I only tell you what folks say." But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The peasants did not believe her. They always thought she received too large a salary, twenty-one roubles a month (five would have been enough), and that of the money that she collected from the children for the firewood and the watchman the greater part she kept for herself. 

The guardian thought the same as the peasants, and he himself made a profit off the firewood and received payments from the peasants for being a guardian--without the knowledge of the authorities.The forest, thank God! was behind them, and now it would be flat, open ground all the way to Vyazovye, and there was not far to go now. They had to cross the river and then the railway line, and then Vyazovye was in sight.

"Where are you driving?" Marya Vassilyevna asked Semyon. "Take the road to the right 

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