Klin, where every corner
of house and garden spoke to him of his mother. How pitilessly was he
dragged through depths of grief and solitude and hopeless longing; till
he stumbled, half fainting, deep in the slough of despair! Hopeless and
heart-sick, forgetting, and, he believed, forgotten by, every living
joy, he fought his battle of temperament hand to hand, imagining every
contest lost. Nothing of his past, his present or his future, was clear
before him. He was as one crying in the wilderness; and no echo of an
answer caught his ear. So numb was he from emotional experience by the
summer's end, that, in the second week of September, he returned to
Moscow for his second winter in the Corps, with hardly more than a dull
and throbbing sense of dread.

The cold weather set in early that year. October and November passed in
a whirl of powdery snow and winds that cut through the heaviest furs. As
the time of Christmas fasts and feasts drew on, Ivan began to long for
what he believed would not be granted him--the spending of his holiday
week in comparative freedom at home. He was, however, too proud to beg
such permission; and not one word from Prince Michael did he receive. It
was, then, not till the very hour that his companions were gayly rushing
off to their various conveyances of departure, that Ivan, standing
ruefully in the snow-filled court-yard, perceived Piotr tramping through
the outer gate, looking about him, undecided as to the right entrance.

That night Ivan slept beneath his father's roof for the first time in
nine months; and in the gray of early morning there came to him an idea
of radiant promise. The pocket-money sent him in September--five hundred
rubles, the existence of which his companions had fortunately never
surmised, remained almost untouched. Ivan was extravagant only in the
purchase of music-paper and harmony-books, which are not matters of
great cost. Why, then, should he not drive to-day to the Tverskaia, and
there select Christmas presents for those few to whom it would be a
delight to give? The custom, not at that day so prevalent in Russia as
now, was still by no means unusual. And though Piotr and Alexei and old
Masha, besides, as a matter of duty, his father, were the names on
Ivan's written list, they were all of them meaningless compared with
that one gift for her for whom no gift in the world could be
sufficiently fine or costly.

Through that whole morning he dragged the sleigh a