ness for all men and for
everything.... The one essential condition of human existence is that
man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great.
If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living
and will die of despair. The Infinite and the Eternal are as essential
for man as the little planet on which he dwells. My friends, all, all:
hail to the Great Idea! The Eternal, Infinite Idea! It is essential to
every man, whoever he may be, to bow down before what is the Great Idea.
Even the stupidest man needs something great. Petrusha... oh, how I want
to see them all again! They don't know, they don't know that that same
Eternal, Grand Idea lies in them all!"

Doctor Salzfish was not present at the ceremony. Coming in suddenly, he
was horrified, and cleared the room, insisting that the patient must not
be excited.

Stepan Trofimovitch died three days later, but by that time he was
completely unconscious. He quietly went out like a candle that is burnt
down. After having the funeral service performed, Varvara Petrovna
took the body of her poor friend to Skvoreshniki. His grave is in the
precincts of the church and is already covered with a marble slab. The
inscription and the railing will be added in the spring.

Varvara Petrovna's absence from town had lasted eight days. Sofya
Matveyevna arrived in the carriage with her and seems to have settled
with her for good. I may mention that as soon as Stepan Trofimovitch
lost consciousness (the morning that he received the sacrament) Varvara
Petrovna promptly asked Sofya Matveyevna to leave the cottage again, and
waited on the invalid herself unassisted to the end, but she sent for
her at once when he had breathed his last. Sofya Matveyevna was terribly
alarmed by Varvara Petrovna's proposition, or rather command, that she
should settle for good at Skvoreshniki, but the latter refused to listen
to her protests.

"That's all nonsense! I will go with you to sell the gospel. I have no
one in the world now."

"You have a son, however," Salzfish observed.

"I have no son!" Varvara Petrovna snapped out--and it was like a
prophecy.

CHAPTER VIII. CONCLUSION

ALL THE CRIMES AND VILLAINIES THAT had been perpetrated were discovered
with extraordinary rapidity, much more quickly than Pyotr Stepanovitch
had expected. To begin with, the luckless Marya Ignatyevna waked up
before daybreak on the night of her husband's murder, missed him