the
singular: "Mamma, please be not thou disturbed if I come home late
to-night."

This pleased her; in such words she felt something serious and strong.

But her uneasiness increased. Since her son's strangeness was not
clarified with time, her heart became more and more sharply troubled
with a foreboding of something unusual. Every now and then she felt a
certain dissatisfaction with him, and she thought: "All people are
like people, and he is like a monk. He is so stern. It's not
according to his years." At other times she thought: "Maybe he has
become interested in some of a girl down there."

But to go about with girls, money is needed, and he gave almost all his
earnings to her.

Thus weeks and months elapsed; and imperceptibly two years slipped by,
two years of a strange, silent life, full of disquieting thoughts and
anxieties that kept continually increasing.

Once, when after supper Pavel drew the curtain over the window, sat
down in a corner, and began to read, his tin lamp hanging on the wall
over his head, the mother, after removing the dishes, came out from the
kitchen and carefully walked up to him. He raised his head, and
without speaking looked at her with a questioning expression.

"Nothing, Pasha, just so!" she said hastily, and walked away, moving
her eyebrows agitatedly. But after standing in the kitchen for a
moment, motionless, thoughtful, deeply preoccupied, she washed her
hands and approached her son again.

"I want to ask you," she said in a low, soft voice, "what you read all
the time."

He put his book aside and said to her: "Sit down, mother."

The mother sat down heavily at his side, and straightening herself into
an attitude of intense, painful expectation waited for something
momentous.

Without looking at her, Pavel spoke, not loudly, but for some reason
very sternly:

"I am reading forbidden books. They are forbidden to be read because
they tell the truth about our--about the workingmen's life. They are
printed in secret, and if I am found with them I will be put in
prison--I will be put in prison because I want to know the truth."

Breathing suddenly became difficult for her. Opening her eyes wide she
looked at her son, and he seemed to her new, as if a stranger. His
voice was different, lower, deeper, more sonorous. He pinched his
thin, downy mustache, and looked oddly askance into the corner. She
grew anxious for her son and pitied him.

"Why do you d