hs. Without asking, I perceived at once
that he was under his special morbid scourge; and when I learned that he
intended retiring to Klin for a period of complete isolation, I was less
astonished than dismayed. I think I had even a momentary presentiment
that from this retirement he was destined never to emerge; though I knew
that he was still some years removed from his fiftieth birthday.
However, with Ivan Mikhailovitch, time was never a thing to be
considered. He was a man of eternity."

Into their two hours together on that last Moscow day, the friends
crowded much important conversation. Ivan unfolded his plans for the
future; and discussed those manuscripts he had brought back, and which
he afterwards intrusted to Kashkine to be delivered to his publishers.
Immediately upon the first printing, they were to be sent to the Musical
Society, to be passed or rejected for the next season's concert series.
This business finished, Ivan plunged into an impulsive account of the
bizarre history of his last months in Florence. But when he had reached
a half-way point, he as suddenly halted; and, Piotr a moment later
announcing that the carriage waited to drive him to his train, Ivan bade
his friend a hurried farewell. Kashkine only learned the end of the tale
that interested him so deeply, some fourteen months later.

Once more, as on the first day of his possession, Ivan reached his
hermitage in the late afternoon of a spring day. But this home-coming
was not like the first; for, among the little throng of servants
gathered in the hall to meet their Prince, one face was missing. After
hasty greetings, Ivan, with a sudden sense of the truth, asked
haltingly for the old servitor whom he had sent back to Russia, nine
months before, from Naples. The reply, anticipated by but one moment,
was a great shock to him. Old Sosha had been buried yesterday; his last
words being a greeting to the master he had so longed to see again.--And
Ivan might have been present at the funeral of this dearly-loved old
man!--But he made no rebuke; for he knew that the humility of these poor
creatures would never have permitted them to disturb his pleasure for
one of themselves.

It was, perhaps, only morbidness that Ivan should have allowed the death
of Sosha, a man of eighty-four, to affect him as it did. Yet the
following weeks taught him that all his recent gloomy meditations and
self-analyses had had in them an element of affectation incompatib