e more the question came to her:

"What now? What am I to do now?"

Recollecting that she had not yet said her prayers, she walked up to
the images, and after standing before them for a few seconds, she sat
down again. Her heart was empty.

The pendulum, which always beat with an energy seeming to say: "I must
get to the goal! I must get to the goal!" slackened its hasty ticking.
The flies buzzed irresolutely, as if pondering a certain plan of action.

Suddenly she recalled a picture she had once seen in the days of her
youth. In the old park of the Zansaylovs, there was a large pond
densely overgrown with water lilies. One gray day in the fall, while
walking along the pond, she had seen a boat in the middle of it. The
pond was dark and calm, and the boat seemed glued to the black water,
thickly strewn with yellow leaves. Profound sadness and a vague sense
of misfortune were wafted from that boat without a rower and without
oars, standing alone and motionless out there on the dull water amid
the dead leaves. The mother had stood a long time at the edge of the
pond meditating as to who had pushed the boat from the shore and why.
Now it seemed to her that she herself was like that boat, which at the
time had reminded her of a coffin waiting for its dead. In the evening
of the same day she had learned that the wife of one of Zansaylov's
clerks had been drowned in the pond--a little woman with black
disheveled hair, who always walked at a brisk gait.

The mother passed her hands over her eyes as if to rub her
reminiscences away, and her thoughts fluttered like a varicolored
ribbon. Overcome by her impressions of the day before, she sat for a
long time, her eyes fixed upon the cup of tea grown cold. Gradually
the desire came to see some wise, simple person, speak to him, and ask
him many things.

As if in answer to her wish, Nikolay Ivanovich came in after dinner.
When she saw him, however, she was suddenly seized with alarm, and
failed to respond to his greeting.

"Oh, my friend," she said softly, "there was no use for you to come
here. If they arrest you here, too, then that will be the end of Pasha
altogether. It's very careless of you! They'll take you without fail
if they see you here."

He clasped her hand tightly, adjusted his glasses on his nose, and
bending his face close to her, explained to her in haste:

"I made an agreement with Pavel and Andrey, that if they were arrested,
I must see t