Why is this? Is it Caterina's death? Is it old age? Is it returning to these village scenes after half a lifetime spent in towns? Is it the sight of the _izbas_, and their torpid, tow-haired, sheepskin-clad inhabitants, and the great slushy cabbage gardens, that has rekindled the ashen past into colours of flame? And yet, except our vodka-seller, there isn't a Jew in the place. However it be, Caterina's face is filmy, phantasmal, compared with my mother's. And mother died forty years ago; the grass of two short years grows over my wife's grave. And Paul? He is living--he kissed me but a few moments back. Yet _his_ face is far-away--elusive. The hues of life are on my father's--poor, ignorant, narrow-minded, warm-hearted father, whose heart I broke. Happily I have not to bear the remembrance of his dying look, but can picture him as I saw him in those miserable, happy days. My father's kiss is warm upon the lips which my son's has just left cold. Poor St. Paul, living up there with your ideals and your theories like a dove in a balloon! And yet, _golubtchik_, how I love you, my handsome, gifted boy, fighting the battle of life so pluckily and well! Ah! it is hard fighting when one is hampered by a conscience. Is it your fault that the cold iron bar of a secret lies between our souls; that a bar my own hands have forged, and which I have not the courage or the strength to break, keeps you from my inmost heart, and makes us strangers? No; you are the best of sons, and love me truly. But if your eyes were purged, and you could see the ugly, hateful thing, and through and beyond it, into my ugly, hateful soul! Ah, no! That must never be. Your affection, your reverential affection, is the only sacred and precious thing yet left to me on earth. If I lost that, if my spirit were cut off even from the semblance of human sympathy, then might the grave close over my body, as it would have already closed over my soul. And yet should I have the courage to die? Yes; for then Paul would know; Paul would obey my wishes and see me buried among my people. Paul would hire mourners (God! hired mourners, when I have a son!) to say the _Kaddish_. Paul would do his duty, though his heart broke. Terrible, ominous words! Break my son's heart as I did my father's! The saints--_voi!_ I mean God--forfend! And for opposite reasons. _Ach_, it is a strange world. Is religion, then, a curse, eternally dividing man from man? No, I will not think these blasphemous thoughts. My poor, brave Paul! To-morrow will be a hard day.