" said Pavel warmly and softly,
pressing his comrades' hands.

"That's it! Until we meet again!" the officer scoffed.

Vyesovshchikov silently pressed Pavel's hands with his short fingers
and breathed heavily. The blood mounted to his thick neck; his eyes
flashed with rancor. The Little Russian's face beamed with a sunny
smile. He nodded his head, and said something to the mother; she made
the sign of the cross over him.

"God sees the righteous," she murmured.

At length the throng of people in the gray coats tumbled out on the
porch, and their spurs jingled as they disappeared. Rybin went last.
He regarded Pavel with an attentive look of his dark eyes and said
thoughtfully: "Well, well--good-by!" and coughing in his beard he
leisurely walked out on the porch.

Folding his hands behind his back, Pavel slowly paced up and down the
room, stepping over the books and clothes tumbled about on the floor.
At last he said somberly:

"You see how it's done! With insult--disgustingly--yes! They left me
behind."

Looking perplexedly at the disorder in the room, the mother whispered
sadly:

"They will take you, too, be sure they will. Why did Nikolay speak to
them the way he did?"

"He got frightened, I suppose," said Pavel quietly. "Yes--It's
impossible to speak to them, absolutely impossible! They cannot
understand!"

"They came, snatched, and carried off!" mumbled the mother, waving her
hands. As her son remained at home, her heart began to beat more
lightly. Her mind stubbornly halted before one fact and refused to be
moved. "How he scoffs at us, that yellow ruffian! How he threatens us!"

"All right, mamma!" Pavel suddenly said with resolution. "Let us pick
all this up!"

He called her "mamma," the word he used only when he came nearer to
her. She approached him, looked into his face, and asked softly:

"Did they insult you?"

"Yes," he answered. "That's--hard! I would rather have gone with
them."

It seemed to her that she saw tears in his eyes, and wishing to soothe
him, with an indistinct sense of his pain, she said with a sigh:

"Wait a while--they'll take you, too!"

"They will!" he replied.

After a pause the mother remarked sorrowfully:

"How hard you are, Pasha! If you'd only reassure me once in a while!
But you don't. When I say something horrible, you say something worse."

He looked at her, moved closer to her, and said gently:

"I cannot, mamma! I cannot lie! You