, if Ivan
was what she believed him to be, he could read the moral as he ran. She
spoke from a bursting heart, and only in small degree relieved herself
by speaking. Nor did she mention their approaching parting; for
reference to this subject was beyond her. Ivan must divine what he could
of her feeling, or he must believe her callous in her great despair.

Meantime the boy had yielded one slender hand to his mother's clasp; the
other was tightly clinched. He sat bolt upright, his burning eyes fixed
sternly on the wall before him, his face pallid save for the two round
spots of flaming red that burned high upon his cheekbones. His heart was
throbbing irregularly. And in his brain, amid the chaos of broken
ideals, crumbled idols, and all the jumbled facts of his new
understanding of misery and of evil:--amid all his strange and vibrant
emotions, there thundered gigantically a series of magnificent minor
chords forming a motive over-poweringly climatic. It was the same theme
of "hope abandoned," which, nearly forty years later, was to open the
last movement of his greatest work: that "Tosca Symphony" which has
moved the whole world to wondering tears. Many times during the
succeeding years it left his memory, and he would try vainly to recall
it. But circumstances always rose to bring it again to his mind; till,
at last, recurrent pain had fixed it there forever: that world-theme,
which had its birth on this first Sunday of his sixteenth year.

It was eleven o'clock when Madame Gregoriev, worn out and trembling with
feeling, finally ended her narrative. It was midnight before she and
Ivan kissed good-night. During that whole hour, neither one of them
uttered a word. Ivan had sunk to the floor at his mother's feet, his
head in her lap, his burning hands clasped in her icy ones, his throat
contracting ever and again with the dry, gasping sob of extreme emotion.
Sophia, on the contrary, sat above him, her head lifted, her pale face
calm, her tearless eyes gazing off into some far country of her own. Yet
before their minds lay the same picture--that of a woman's woe: a petty
thing, the commonest of all affairs in the man-ruled world, yet hardly a
thing to be discussed. Some reverence, or understanding, must be granted
it by the dullest mind. So, as the distant voice of Moscow's great bell
boomed its twelve strokes, Ivan rose, slowly, as one still in his dream;
went for a moment into the mother-clasp; and then, still without