Sultan sniffed, and began to eat voraciously, while his master stood beside him and gazed mournfully at the surrounding gloom. “Ah! what can I do?” he thought. “How can I force people to alter their opinions? I myself expected to be told how to live, and how to think. God has not given me the voice of a prophet, so, in what way can I help?” Sultan gave a grunt of satisfaction. “Eat away, old boy, eat away!” said Soloveitchik. “I would let you loose for a little run, but I haven’t got the key, and I’m so tired.” Then to himself, “What clever, well-informed people those are! They know such a lot; good Christians, very likely; and here am I…. Ah! well, perhaps it’s my own fault. I should have liked to say a word to them, but I didn’t know how to do it.” From the distance, beyond the town, there came the sound of a long, plaintive whistle. Sultan raised his head, and listened. Large drops fell from his muzzle into the pail. “Eat away,” said Soloveitchik, “That’s the train!” Sultan heaved a sigh. “I wonder if men will ever live like that! Perhaps they can’t,” said Soloveitchik aloud, as he shrugged his shoulders, despairingly. There, in the darkness he imagined that he could see a multitude of men, vast, unending as eternity, sinking ever deeper in the gloom; a succession of centuries without beginning and without end; an unbroken chain of wanton suffering for which remedy there was none; and, on high, where God dwelt, silence, eternal silence. Sultan knocked against the pail, and upset it. Then, as he wagged his tail, the chain rattled slightly. “Gobbled it all up, eh?” Soloveitchik patted the dog’s shaggy coat and felt its warm body writhe in joyous response to his touch. Then he went back to the house. He could hear Sultan’s chain rattle, and the yard seemed less gloomy than before, while blacker and more sinister was the mill with its tall chimney and narrow sheds that looked like coffins. From the window a broad ray of light fell across the garden, illuminating in mystic fashion the frail little flowers that shrank beneath the turbulent heaven with its countless banners, black and ominous, unfolded to the night. Overcome by grief, unnerved by a sense of solitude and of some irreparable loss, Soloveitchik went back into his room, sat down at the table, and wept. CHAPTER XXVII. Volochine owned immense works in St. Petersburg upon which the existence of thousands of his _employés_ depended. At the present time, while a strike was in progress, he had turned his back upon the crowd of hungry, dirty malcontents, and was enjoying a trip in the provinces. Libertine as he was, he thought of nothing but women, and in young, fresh, provincial women he displayed an intense, in fact, an absorbing interest. He pictured them as delightfully shy and timid, yet sturdy as a woodland mushroom, and their provocative perfume of youth and purity he scented from afar.