"Who told you all this?" asked Serafima Alexandrovna in an austere low voice.
"Agathya says so, _barinya_" answered Fedosya; "it's she that knows."
"Knows!" exclaimed Serafima Alexandrovna in irritation, as though she wished to protect herself somehow from this sudden anxiety. "What nonsense! Please don't come to me with any such notions in the future. Now you may go."
Fedosya, dejected, her feelings hurt, left her mistress.
"What nonsense! As though Lelechka could die!" thought Serafima Alexandrovna to herself, trying to conquer the feeling of coldness and fear which took possession of her at the thought of the possible death of Lelechka. Serafima Alexandrovna, upon reflection, attributed these women's beliefs in omens to ignorance. She saw clearly that there could be no possible connexion between a child's quite ordinary diversion and the continuation of the child's life. She made a special effort that evening to occupy her mind with other matters, but her thoughts returned involuntarily to the fact that Lelechka loved to hide herself.
When Lelechka, was still quite small, and had learned to distinguish between her mother and her nurse, she sometimes, sitting in her nurse's arms, made a sudden roguish grimace, and hid her laughing face in the nurse's shoulder. Then she would look out with a sly glance.
Of late, in those rare moments of the _barinya's_ absence from the nursery, Fedosya had again taught Lelechka to hide; and when Lelechka's mother, on coming in, saw how lovely the child looked when she was hiding, she herself began to play hide and seek with her tiny daughter.
The next day Serafima Alexandrovna, absorbed in her joyous cares for Lelechka, had forgotten Fedosya's words of the day before.
But when she returned to the nursery, after having ordered the dinner, and she heard Lelechka suddenly cry "_Tiu-tiu_!" from under the table, a feeling of fear suddenly took hold of her. Though she reproached herself at once for this unfounded, superstitious dread, nevertheless she could not enter wholeheartedly into the spirit of Lelechka's favourite game, and she tried to divert Lelechka's attention to something else.
Lelechka was a lovely and obedient child. She eagerly complied with her mother's new wishes. But as she had got into the habit of hiding from her mother in some corner, and of crying out "_Tiu-tiu_!" so even that day she returned more than once to the game.