were being read, where in the dusk of evening you could not
recognize anyone, and--wept. Tears glistened on his face and on
his beard. Here someone close at hand was weeping, then someone
else farther away, then others and still others, and little by
little the church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later,
within five minutes, the nuns' choir was singing; no one was weeping
and everything was as before.

Soon the service was over. When the bishop got into his carriage
to drive home, the gay, melodious chime of the heavy, costly bells
was filling the whole garden in the moonlight. The white walls, the
white crosses on the tombs, the white birch-trees and black shadows,
and the far-away moon in the sky exactly over the convent, seemed
now living their own life, apart and incomprehensible, yet very
near to man. It was the beginning of April, and after the warm
spring day it turned cool; there was a faint touch of frost, and
the breath of spring could be felt in the soft, chilly air. The
road from the convent to the town was sandy, the horses had to go
at a walking pace, and on both sides of the carriage in the brilliant,
peaceful moonlight there were people trudging along home from church
through the sand. And all was silent, sunk in thought; everything
around seemed kindly, youthful, akin, everything--trees and sky
and even the moon, and one longed to think that so it would be
always.

At last the carriage drove into the town and rumbled along the
principal street. The shops were already shut, but at Erakin's, the
millionaire shopkeeper's, they were trying the new electric lights,
which flickered brightly, and a crowd of people were gathered round.
Then came wide, dark, deserted streets, one after another; then the
highroad, the open country, the fragrance of pines. And suddenly
there rose up before the bishop's eyes a white turreted wall, and
behind it a tall belfry in the full moonlight, and beside it five
shining, golden cupolas: this was the Pankratievsky Monastery, in
which Bishop Pyotr lived. And here, too, high above the monastery,
was the silent, dreamy moon. The carriage drove in at the gate,
crunching over the sand; here and there in the moonlight there were
glimpses of dark monastic figures, and there was the sound of
footsteps on the flag-stones. . . .

"You know, your holiness, your mamma arrived while you were away,"
the lay brother informed the bishop as he went into his cell.

"My mother?