l as his first had
been unhappy.

Joseph once settled and happily at work, Ivan went back to his own
routine again in excellent spirits. Now and then he saw the young man,
who regarded him, as Ivan could not but know, as his benefactor, his
self-constituted guardian and adviser. Ivan was himself a man of so much
individuality and independence that he failed to understand Joseph as
one of those who cannot live without leaning, if not for help, at least
for constant encouragement, on some one else. Ivan had, indeed,
perceived that a little vein of weakness ran side by side with the
peculiar spirituality of the Pole. But so beyond his own nature was this
combination, that it never entered his head to watch and guard the young
fellow as he might have done had he understood. Perhaps, in this way,
Joseph's gift might have been saved to the world. But fate grants much
help to no man; and when Ivan's eyes were opened, it was already too
late. This did not come about, however, until, in the spring of the year
1871, something had happened to change Gregoriev's mode of life almost
as completely as he had altered that of the waif thrown up at his door
out of the troubled sea of the Akheskaia.

* * * * *

It was now twelve years since the youth Ivan, graduated from his four
penitential years of military schooling, had taken his first long flight
from Moscow, northward, into the joyous unknown: twelve years since he
had put behind him all that half-comprehended blackness of evil and grim
unhappiness that had weighted his boyhood with vague premonitions of
coming disaster. Indeed, had he been told, at the hour of his going,
that he should never again know a month of life in the same house with
his father, he would have been possessed by a secret joy. Not so,
however, Prince Michael. Nothing in all his merciless life had hurt this
man of shadows like the defection of his son. Nor did the rolling years
soften the sting of loss. Rather, as, little by little, the mantle of
loneliness was drawn closer and closer about him, muffling him at last
even from contact with the companions of his relaxation and license, the
hardness and the bitterness in him increased, till something of it was
surmised even by the jackals that served him. Still, of the processes of
that strange nature, no one in the world knew much. His high position,
held against all rivals by power of fear, naturally brought him into
contact with