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all. I beg of you, mother, if you love me, do not hinder me!"
    "My darling, my beloved!" she cried, "maybe it would be better for me not to have known anything!"
    He took her hand and pressed it firmly in his. The word "mother," pronounced by him with feverish emphasis, and that clasp of the hand so new and strange, moved her.
    "I will do nothing!" she said in a broken voice. "Only be on your guard! Be on your guard!" Not knowing what he should be on his guard against, nor how to warn him, she added mournfully: "You are getting so thin."
    And with a look of affectionate warmth, which seemed to embrace his firm, well-shaped body, she said hastily, and in a low voice:
    "God be with you! Live as you want to. I will not hinder you. One thing only I beg of you--do not speak to people unguardedly! You must be on the watch with people; they all hate one another. They live in greed and envy; all are glad to do injury; people persecute out of sheer amusement. When you begin to accuse them and to judge them, they will hate you, and will hound you to destruction!"
    Pavel stood in the doorway listening to the melancholy speech, and when the mother had finished he said with a smile:
    "Yes, people are sorry creatures; but when I came to recognize that there is truth in the world, people became better." He smiled again and added: "I do not know how it happened myself! From childhood I feared everybody; as I grew up I began to hate everybody, some for their meanness, others--well, I do not know why--just so! And now I see all the people in a different way. I am grieved for them all! I cannot understand it; but my heart turned softer when I recognized that there is truth in men, and that not all are to blame for their foulness and filth."
    He was silent as if listening to something within himself. Then he said in a low voice and thoughtfully:
    "That's how truth lives."
    She looked at him tenderly.
    "May God protect you!" she sighed. "It is a dangerous change that
has come upon you."
    When he had fallen asleep, the mother rose carefully from her bed and came gently into her son's room. Pavel's swarthy, resolute, stern face was clearly outlined against the white pillow. Pressing her hand to her bosom, the mother stood at his bedside. Her lips moved mutely, and great tears rolled down her cheeks.
CHAPTER III
    Again they lived in silence, distant and yet near to each other. Once, in the middle of the week, on a holiday, as he was preparing to leave the house he said to his mother:
    "I expect some people here on Saturday."
    "What people?" she asked.
    "Some people from our village, and others from the city."
    "From the city?" repeated the mother, shaking her head. And
suddenly she broke into sobs.
    "Now, mother, why this?" cried Pavel resentfully. "What for?"
    Drying her face with her apron, she answered quietly:
    "I don't know, but it is the way I feel."
    He paced up and down the room, then halting before her, said:
    "Are you afraid?"
    "I am afraid," she acknowledged. "Those people from the city--
who knows them?"
    He bent down to look in her face, and said in an offended tone, and, it seemed to her, angrily, like his father:
    "This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh. We must grow bold; it is time!
    "It's all the same," he said, as he turned from her; "they'll meet
in my house, anyway."
    "Don't be angry with me!" the mother begged sadly. "How can I help being afraid? All my life I have lived in fear!"
    "Forgive me!" was his gentler reply, "but I cannot do otherwise,"
and he walked away.
    For three days her heart was in a tremble, sinking in fright each time she remembered that strange people were soon to come to her house. She could not picture them to herself, but it seemed to her they were terrible people. It was they who had shown her son the road he was going.
    On Saturday night