nd her
fingers trembled.

"You did not understand us, mother!" Pavel said softly and kindly.

"Beg your pardon, mother!" Rybin added in a slow, thick voice. He
looked at Pavel and smiled. "I forgot that you're too old to cut out
your warts."

"I did not speak," continued Pavel, "about that good and gracious God
in whom you believe, but about the God with whom the priests threaten
us as with a stick, about the God in whose name they want to force all
of us to the evil will of the few."

"That's it, right you are!" exclaimed Rybin, striking his fingers upon
the table. "They have mutilated even our God for us, they have turned
everything in their hands against us. Mark you, mother, God created
man in his own image and after his own likeness. Therefore he is like
man if man is like him. But we have become, not like God, but like
wild beasts! In the churches they set up a scarecrow before us. We
have got to change our God, mother; we must cleanse him! They have
dressed him up in falsehood and calumny; they have distorted his face
in order to destroy our souls!"

He talked composedly and very distinctly and intelligibly. Every word
of his speech fell upon the mother's ears like a blow. And his face
set in the frame of his black beard, his broad face attired, as it
were, in mourning, frightened her. The dark gleam of his eyes was
insupportable to her. He aroused in her a sense of anguish, and filled
her heart with terror.

"No, I'd better go away," she said, shaking her head in negation. "It's
not in my power to listen to this. I cannot!"

And she quickly walked into the kitchen followed by the words of Rybin:

"There you have it, Pavel! It begins not in the head, but in the
heart. The heart is such a place that nothing else will grow in it."

"Only reason," said Pavel firmly, "only reason will free mankind."

"Reason does not give strength!" retorted Rybin emphatically. "The
heart gives strength, and not the head, I tell you."

The mother undressed and lay down in bed without saying her prayer. She
felt cold and miserable. And Rybin, who at first seemed such a staid,
wise man, now aroused in her a blind hostility.

"Heretic! Sedition-maker!" she thought, listening to his even voice
flowing resonantly from his deep chest. He, too, had come--he was
indispensable.

He spoke confidently and composedly:

"The holy place must not be empty. The spot where God dwells is a
place of pain; and if h