"You will have your children restored to you," continued Father Cyril; "and I am to see that they are carefully brought up in the sacred rites and doctrines of our holy religion. I am also to report to the consistory how frequently you and your wife come to mass and to confession. Go home now. To-morrow I will come and bless your house." The driver of the sledge had already spread the news. And when Nicolas left the church-house he found he had to pass through groups of unsympathetic neighbours, most of whom jeered at him or hailed him with mock applause. Pale and haggard, enfeebled by long confinement and prison fare, he could not hurry homewards out of their way, but crawled along with bowed-down head and eyes almost blinded with tears. Was it for this he had belied his conscience and turned renegade and traitor? The veriest drunkard did not believe in his conversion. What were those words repeated again and again in his brain? "Seeing he has crucified to himself 'the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame.'" Oh, terrible words! His house was the peasant's hut next to Khariton Kondraty's, and Sergius, seeing his arrival, rushed in, after giving him a few minutes to greet his wife and children, to ask how it was he had been released. Surely his father would be set free too, and perhaps Alexis himself, though as presbyter he was least likely to escape exile. Nicolas had thrown himself breathless and exhausted on the bench beside the stove, and his wife was standing before him speechless and bewildered. "Is my father coming?" cried Sergius. "Are the others let off? Oh, Nicolas Pavilovitch, tell me quickly!" "They could all come home if they'd do as I've done," answered Nicolas in a muffled voice. "He has denied the faith," sobbed his wife. "He was a miserable drunkard before he joined the brethren, and now he is a lost soul." "But you'll do as I do," said Nicolas. "Never!" she cried. "Never! I'll throw myself into the river first!" Sergius stole away quickly and silently. If that was the price to pay for liberty, he knew well his father would not give it. No, not to gain the whole world. The recantation of Nicolas was a great shock to the little community of Stundists in Knishi, consisting now only of a few desolate women and their children. Father Cyril ordered the children of Nicolas to be sent home, notwithstanding his wife's persistent refusal to join her husband in abjuring her faith. The three little ones, all under ten years of age, were very dear to her, and to hold them again in her arms, or to work from dawn to dark for them, was a great consolation, but nothing would induce her to go to mass with them and their father. When she heard that her husband had given evidence, mostly false, against his fellow-prisoners, she refused to quit the house, or to hold any intercourse with her old friends and neighbours. Her tribulation was greater than that of the other women.