whistled mournfully, a note
of alarm in their song. The larks sang, soaring up to meet the sun.
The distance opened up, the nocturnal shadows lifting from the hills.

"Sometimes a man will speak and speak to you, and you won't understand
him until he succeeds in telling you some simple word; and this one
word will suddenly lighten up everything," the mother said
thoughtfully. "There's that sick man, for instance; I've heard and
known myself how the workingmen in the factories and everywhere are
squeezed; but you get used to it from childhood on, and it doesn't
touch your heart much. But he suddenly tells you such an outrageous,
vile thing! O Lord! Can it be that people give their whole lives away
to work in order that the masters may permit themselves pleasure?
That's without justification."

The thoughts of the mother were arrested by this fact. Its dull,
impudent gleam threw light upon a series of similar facts, at one time
known to her, but now forgotten.

"It's evident that they are satiated with everything. I know one
country officer who compelled the peasants to salute his horse when it
was led through the village; and he arrested everyone who failed to
salute it. Now, what need had he of that? It's impossible to
understand." After a pause she sighed: "The poor people are stupid
from poverty, and the rich from greed."

Sofya began to hum a song bold as the morning.

CHAPTER V

The life of Nilovna flowed on with strange placidity. This calmness
sometimes astonished her. There was her son immured in prison. She
knew that a severe sentence awaited him, yet every time the idea of it
came to her mind her thoughts strayed to Andrey, Fedya, and an endless
series of other people she had never seen, but only heard of. The
figure of her son appeared to her absorbing all the people into his own
destiny. The contemplative feeling aroused in her involuntarily and
unnoticeably diverted her inward gaze away from him to all sides. Like
thin, uneven rays it touched upon everything, tried to throw light
everywhere, and make one picture of the whole. Her mind was hindered
from dwelling upon some one thing.

Sofya soon went off somewhere, and reappeared in about five days, merry
and vivacious. Then, in a few hours, she vanished again, and returned
within a couple of weeks. It seemed as if she were borne along in life
in wide circles.

Nikolay, always occupied, lived a monotonous, methodical exist