kept getting a little muddled. Nikolay looked
anything but cordial, not at all as a relation should. He was pale and
sat looking down and continually moving his eyebrows as though trying to
control acute pain.

"You have a kind heart and a generous one, Nicolas," the old man put in
among other things, "you're a man of great culture, you've grown up in
the highest circles, and here too your behaviour has hitherto been a
model, which has been a great consolation to your mother, who is so
precious to all of us.... And now again everything has appeared in such
an unaccountable light, so detrimental to all! I speak as a friend of
your family, as an old man who loves you sincerely and a relation, at
whose words you cannot take offence.... Tell me, what drives you to such
reckless proceedings so contrary to all accepted rules and habits? What
can be the meaning of such acts which seem almost like outbreaks of
delirium?"

Nikolay listened with vexation and impatience. All at once there was a
gleam of something sly and mocking in his eyes.

"I'll tell you what drives me to it," he said sullenly, and looking
round him he bent down to Ivan Ossipovitch's ear. The refined Alyosha
Telyatnikov moved three steps farther away towards the window, and the
colonel coughed over the Golos. Poor Ivan Ossipovitch hurriedly and
trustfully inclined his ear; he was exceedingly curious. And then
something utterly incredible, though on the other side only too
unmistakable, took place. The old man suddenly felt that, instead of
telling him some interesting secret, Nikolay had seized the upper
part of his ear between his teeth and was nipping it rather hard. He
shuddered, and breath failed him.

"Nicolas, this is beyond a joke!" he moaned mechanically in a voice not
his own.

Alyosha and the colonel had not yet grasped the situation, besides they
couldn't see, and fancied up to the end that the two were whispering
together; and yet the old man's desperate face alarmed them. They looked
at one another with wide-open eyes, not knowing whether to rush to his
assistance as agreed or to wait. Nikolay noticed this perhaps, and bit
the harder.

"Nicolas! Nicolas!" his victim moaned again, "come... you've had your
joke, that's enough!"

In another moment the poor governor would certainly have died of terror;
but the monster had mercy on him, and let go his ear. The old man's
deadly terror lasted for a full minute, and it was followed by a sort of