and gave her the words to express her
indignation. "Then many and many a one would weep, and even the
wicked, the men without conscience would tremble! I would make them
taste gall, even as they made Christ drink of the cup of bitterness,
and as they now do our children. They have bruised a mother's heart!"

Nikolay rose, and pulling his little beard with trembling fingers, he
said slowly in an unfamiliar tone of voice:

"Some day you will speak to them, I think!"

He started, looked at his watch again, and asked in a hurry:

"So it's settled? You'll come over to me in the city?"

She silently nodded her head.

"When? Try to do it as soon as possible." And he added in a tender
voice: "I'll be anxious for you; yes, indeed!"

She looked at him in surprise. What was she to him? With bent head,
smiling in embarrassment, he stood before her, dressed in a simple
black jacket, stooping, nearsighted.

"Have you money?" he asked, dropping his eyes.

"No."

He quickly whipped his purse out of his pocket, opened it, and handed
it to her.

"Here, please take some."

She smiled involuntarily, and shaking her head, observed:

"Everything about all of you is different from other people. Even
money has no value for you. People do anything to get money; they kill
their souls for it. But for you money is so many little pieces of
paper, little bits of copper. You seem to keep it by you just out of
kindness to people."

Nikolay Ivanovich laughed softly.

"It's an awfully bothersome article, money is. Both to take it and to
give it is embarrassing."

He caught her hand, pressed it warmly, and asked again:

"So you will try to come soon, won't you?"

And he walked away quietly, as was his wont.

She got herself ready to go to him on the fourth day after his visit.
When the cart with her two trunks rolled out of the village into the
open country, she turned her head back, and suddenly had the feeling
that she was leaving the place forever--the place where she had passed
the darkest and most burdensome period of her life, the place where
that other varied life had begun, in which the next day swallowed up
the day before, and each was filled by an abundance of new sorrows and
new joys, new thoughts and new feelings.

The factory spread itself like a huge, clumsy, dark-red, spider,
raising its lofty smokestacks high up into the sky. The small
one-storied houses pressed against it, gray, flattened out on