, after all, was only
the cloak to another: that of the possibility of learning how his cousin
fared. For of her, the young Princess, he had learned practically
nothing since the time of her hasty marriage in a distant land. That she
spent her life in and around Petersburg, he was aware. But he had never
once seen her in the city; and had never been sure of her immediate
whereabouts. That her place in his heart had never been usurped, nor her
image grown dim with the passing years, was all he realized to-day.

Ivan's inheritance from his mother was a temperament sensitive to the
point of morbidness. This unhappy characteristic had been fostered only
during his early years. But he had not attempted to change it till the
period of his disgrace plainly offered a choice between a resolute
stifling of his pain or downright madness. Being the son of his father,
he made the practical selection. And he saw now that the years of his
independent poverty had done much towards the development of
common-sense, and the extinction of that hypersensibility which had so
marred his otherwise fine nature. Moreover, just the regular, daily
routine of work, and the friendly rivalry with his fellow-students, had
imbued him with the manly courage with which he faced the world. Yet not
one of us can permanently alter his temperament; and, to the end of his
life, Ivan was destined to suffer periodic torments from shyness,
natural reticence, and a never-dying sense of shame at the memory of
that unjust disgrace which by this time many interpreted rightly, and
many others had completely forgotten.

For some years, in fact since his boyhood, Ivan's mental attitude
towards his father had been as to a black shadow which had lain across
the whole of his mother's existence and the greater part of his own.
When his change of feeling began, or how, he did not know. Possibly it
was as far back as the trial and conviction, through his father's
indictment and evidence, of Brodsky, his own bitterest enemy. Certainly
its development had certainly been unconscious. And to-day Ivan was
himself surprised at his secret feeling of tenderness towards Prince
Michael, as for one aged and broken with grief. After the absolute
silence of four years, he found it almost a pleasure to write the lonely
man, telling him of his little success, his sudden change of residence,
something of his ambitions for the future; but not a word of his long
struggle with poverty, and th