ll table. The other hung by her side without stirring. Now and then
she caught her breath slightly.

"It was too startling. Just fancy! She thought that I was making
preparations to leave her without saying anything. I knelt by the side
of her chair and entreated her to think of what she was saying! She put
her hand on my head, but she persists in her delusion all the same. She
had always thought that she was worthy of her children's confidence, but
apparently it was not so. Her son could not trust her love nor yet her
understanding--and now I was planning to abandon her in the same cruel
and unjust manner, and so on, and so on. Nothing I could say.... It
is morbid obstinacy.... She said that she felt there was something,
some change in me.... If my convictions were calling me away, why
this secrecy, as though she had been a coward or a weakling not safe to
trust? 'As if my heart could play traitor to my children,' she said....
It was hardly to be borne. And she was smoothing my head all the
time.... It was perfectly useless to protest. She is ill. Her very
soul is...."

I did not venture to break the silence which fell between us. I looked
into her eyes, glistening through the veil.

"I! Changed!" she exclaimed in the same low tone. "My convictions
calling me away! It was cruel to hear this, because my trouble is that I
am weak and cannot see what I ought to do. You know that. And to end it
all I did a selfish thing. To remove her suspicions of myself I told her
of Mr. Razumov. It was selfish of me. You know we were completely
right in agreeing to keep the knowledge away from her. Perfectly right.
Directly I told her of our poor Victor's friend being here I saw how
right we have been. She ought to have been prepared; but in my distress
I just blurted it out. Mother got terribly excited at once. How long
has he been here? What did he know, and why did he not come to see us at
once, this friend of her Victor? What did that mean? Was she not to be
trusted even with such memories as there were left of her son?... Just
think how I felt seeing her, white like a sheet, perfectly motionless,
with her thin hands gripping the arms of the chair. I told her it was
all my fault."

I could imagine the motionless dumb figure of the mother in her chair,
there, behind the door, near which the daughter was talking to me.
The silence in there seemed to call aloud for vengeance against an
historical fact and the modern instances of it