e hand resting on the arm of the chair.

She did not move. With the window before her she had no longer that
attitude suggesting expectation. The blind was down; and outside
there was only the night sky harbouring a thunder-cloud, and the town
indifferent and hospitable in its cold, almost scornful, toleration--a
respectable town of refuge to which all these sorrows and hopes were
nothing. Her white head was bowed.

The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great
stage of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this
other glimpse behind the scenes, something more profound than the words
and gestures of the public play. I had the certitude that this mother,
refused in her heart to give her son up after all. It was more
than Rachel's inconsolable mourning, it was something deeper, more
inaccessible in its frightful tranquillity. Lost in the ill-defined
mass of the high-backed chair, her white, inclined profile suggested
the contemplation of something in her lap, as though a beloved head were
resting there.

I had this glimpse behind the scenes, and then Miss Haldin, passing by
the young man, shut the door. It was not done without hesitation. For a
moment I thought that she would go to her mother, but she sent in only
an anxious glance. Perhaps if Mrs. Haldin had moved...but no. There
was in the immobility of that bloodless face the dreadful aloofness of
suffering without remedy.

Meantime the young man kept his eyes fixed on the floor. The thought
that he would have to repeat the story he had told already was
intolerable to him. He had expected to find the two women together. And
then, he had said to himself, it would be over for all time--for all
time. "It's lucky I don't believe in another world," he had thought
cynically.

Alone in his room after having posted his secret letter, he had regained
a certain measure of composure by writing in his secret diary. He was
aware of the danger of that strange self-indulgence. He alludes to it
himself, but he could not refrain. It calmed him--it reconciled him
to his existence. He sat there scribbling by the light of a solitary
candle, till it occurred to him that having heard the explanation of
Haldin's arrest, as put forward by Sophia Antonovna, it behoved him to
tell these ladies himself. They were certain to hear the tale through
some other channel, and then his abstention would look strange, not only
to the mother and sister of Hal