"And what about you, worldling? You are also sewing rubbishy words, and what do they mean? Well--a threefold alleluia--a double----" Lukian smiled at him and then went out on the terrace also, and Aleksander, turning to the shopman, said in a tone of conviction: "They can't stand up to me, they simply can't! They disappear like smoke before a flame." The shopman looked at him from under his brows, and observed dryly: "I have not thought about the matter." "What! Do you mean you have not thought about it? This is a business which demands to be thought about." He sat for a moment in silence, with drooping head. Then the old men called him, and they all three went away. This man had burst upon me like a bonfire in the night. He burned brightly, and when he was extinguished, left me feeling that there was truth in his refusal to live as other men. In the evening, choosing a good time, I spoke about him excitedly to the head icon-painter. Quiet and kind Ivan Larionovich listened to what I had to say, and explained: "He belongs to the Byegouns,[1] a sort of sect; they acknowledge no authority." "How do they live?" "Like fugitives they wander about the earth; that is why they have been given the name Byegoun. They say that no one ought to have land, or property. And the police look upon them as dangerous, and arrest them." Although my life was bitter, I could not understand how any one could run away from everything pleasant. In the life which went on around me at that time, there was much that was interesting and precious to me, and Aleksander Vassiliev soon faded from my mind. [Footnote 1: Byegouns, or wanderers, still another sect of Old Believers.] But from time to time, in hours of darkness, he appeared to me. He came by the fields, or by the gray road to the forest, pushed his cap aside with a convulsive movement of his white hands, unsoiled by work, and muttered: "I am going on the straight road; I have no part in this world; I have broken all ties." In conjunction with him I remembered my father, as grandmother had seen him in her dream, with a walnut stick in his hand, and behind him a spotted dog running, with its tongue hanging out. CHAPTER XIII The icon-painting workshop occupied two rooms in a large house partly built of stone. One room had three windows overlooking the yard and one overlooking the garden; the other room had one window overlooking the garden and another facing the street. These windows were small and square, and their panes, irisated by age, unwillingly admitted the pale, diffused light of the winter days. Both rooms were closely packed with tables, and at every table sat the bent figures of icon-painters. From the ceilings were suspended glass balls full of water, which reflected the light from the lamps and threw it upon the square surfaces of the icons in white cold rays.