black and blue marks every time he had fallen into temptation that at
last the limits stood instinctively before his frightened perception
like an invisible iron grating. A foot's breadth beyond was, in his
imagination, the blackest crime, an enormity which would draw down the
fiercest retribution upon him.

That Silla was an uncommon and remarkable being of a higher order, so to
speak, than himself, had been driven into him in so many ways ever since
she came into the world, that he looked upon the assertion as raised
above all doubt.

Notwithstanding everything that he had endured for her sake, or perhaps,
by a strange contradiction, just because of these sufferings, the
feeling that she was under his care was most highly developed. His
admiration of her was unqualified; he thought her more than remarkable
in her blue bow and an old red stuff rose in her hat, and he submitted
to a wilfulness which was quite as despotic as even Mrs. Holman's. When
he had sat long enough and let her fill his hair with dust, she would
order him to pull off her shoes and stockings. If he did it, he got a
beating; if he did not do it, she screamed, and then he got a beating
too.

Insecurity was, so to speak, the soil on which he lived, and the
hurried, shrinking glances he continually cast, as if from habit,
towards the cellar door--even when his often guilt-laden conscience felt
itself most guiltless--were only the fruit of daily experience.

"You could see the bad conscience in his face, a long way off," said
Mrs. Holman; and it was true--the quick, watchful look up with the grey
eyes was to see what sins he was guilty of now.

"Good neighbours and other good things," the catechism says. But in our
times we have no neighbours; you do not know who lives on the floor
above you or on the floor below, or even on the other side of the
passage. And so it was that no one in the house had any ear to speak of
for Nikolai's various untoward fortunes below in the cellar, although
their character often asserted itself with no uncertain sound during
their execution.

The neighbours had become accustomed to the continual screaming and
howling of that naughty boy, just as one accustoms one's self to piano
practising or the din of a factory; perhaps too, they comforted
themselves with the thought that it was most fortunate that such a
morally depraved child had come under discipline and correction.

When Nikolai and Silla wandered as usual up a