o out immediately after getting up."

Stepan, combing his tangled beard, asked the mother solicitously how to
find her in the city. To-day the peasant's face seemed more finished
to her. While they drank tea he remarked, smiling:

"How wonderfully things happen!"

"What?" asked Tatyana.

"Why, this acquaintance--so simply."

The mother said thoughtfully, but confidently:

"In this affair there's a marvelous simplicity in everything."

The host and hostess restrained themselves from demonstrativeness in
parting with her; they were sparing of words, but lavish in little
attentions for her comfort.

Sitting in the post, the mother reflected that this peasant would begin
to work carefully, noiselessly, like a mole, without cease, and that at
his side the discontented voice of his wife would always sound, and the
dry burning gleam in her green eyes would never die out of her so long
as she cherished the revengeful wolfish anguish of a mother for lost
children.

The mother recalled Rybin--his blood, his face, his burning eyes, his
words. Her heart was compressed again with a bitter feeling of
impotence; and along the entire road to the city the powerful figure of
black-bearded Mikhail with his torn shirt, his hands bound behind his
back, his disheveled head, clothed in wrath and faith in his truth,
stood out before her on the drab background of the gray day. And as
she regarded the figure, she thought of the numberless villages timidly
pressed to the ground; of the people, faint-heartedly and secretly
awaiting the coming of truth; and of the thousands of people who
senselessly and silently work their whole lifetime without awaiting the
coming of anything.

Life represented itself to her as an unplowed, hilly field which mutely
awaits the workers and promises a harvest to free and honest hands:
"Fertilize me with seeds of reason and truth; I will return them to you
a hundredfold."

When from afar she saw the roofs and spires of the city, a warm joy
animated and eased her perturbed, worn heart. The preoccupied faces of
those people flashed up in her memory who, from day to day, without
cease, in perfect confidence kindle the fire of thought and scatter the
sparks over the whole earth. Her soul was flooded by the serene desire
to give these people her entire force, and--doubly the love of a
mother, awakened and animated by their thoughts.

At home Nikolay opened the door for the mother. He was disheveled an