er every faculty upon herself in order to
keep from him any betrayal of her condition? Ivan had, certainly, more
than once remarked the haggard pallor of her face; or caught her in an
involuntary movement of pain. There were nights at school when he
thought long and anxiously of her. Yet he was thoroughly unprepared
when, on the morning of the third of April, he received from her a
brief, strained, unnatural note, containing the astounding information
that she was starting at once, with his aunt, for the Riviera, where she
might remain for some weeks.

He had the day to ponder over this news: reserving the greater pain of
it for the night: when, happily, he should be unmolested. But he never
came to this; for, at the end of the evening study-period, he was called
from the assembly-hall by no less a person than Colonel Becker himself,
at the door of whose dreaded room stood Piotr, white-faced and red-eyed.
At his appearance Ivan halted for one, heart-stilling instant. Then he
muttered, in a hoarse, dry voice:

"My mother!--She is dead?"

Piotr slowly shook his head, replying: "Not yet.--They have sent for
you."

CHAPTER V

DEATH JOY

During that long winter when the mental eyes of Ivan were first opening
to the meaning of life and the individual struggles of each to find his
place in a world apparently unassailable, Ivan's mother, Princess
Sophia, slowly, in great anguish of body, was learning a last lesson of
the master by whom she had never been spared. Through that dark period,
though mother and son met weekly, their intercourse, hitherto so full,
so unreserved, became inevitably hesitant and broken. Each was bearing a
burden which neither was willing to reveal to the other. Ivan,
concealing from the tender woman every sign of his persecution at the
hands of his companions in the Corps, felt himself constantly
tongue-tied before her. And though ordinarily the mother-sense would
speedily have penetrated that awkward reserve, Sophia, herself all
unaccustomed to deceit, was so fully occupied in hiding every sign of
her own secret, that Ivan's reticence appeared to her only the
reflection of her own. It was as natural, then, as it was unfortunate,
that these visits, looked forward to by each of them as bright oases in
an otherwise treeless desert, should also have brought with them their
quota of discomfort and vain regret. Throughout each week, woman and boy
alike hungered for each other. Yet on Sunday ni