Tears streamed down her cheeks, and Iván Golubenko was so disturbed and confused that he could only catch in his own her cold, bony hand and cover it with kisses; tears were suffocating him, and he could not utter a word, but in this outburst of motherly love he felt such a terrible reproach to himself that he would have preferred to be lying himself upon the field, shot through the head, than to hear himself praised for his friendship by this woman who would in half an hour find out the whole truth; what would she then think of him? Did not he, the friend, the almost brother, stand quietly by when a revolver was pointed at Vladímir? Did not this brother himself measure the space between the two antagonists and load the revolvers? All this he did himself, did consciously; and now this friend and brother silently sat there without having even the courage to fulfil his duty. He was afraid; at this moment he despised himself, but could not prevail upon himself to say even one word. His soul was oppressed by a strange lack of harmony; he felt sick at heart and stifling. And in the meanwhile time flew--he knew it, and the more he knew it the less had he the courage to deprive Pelageia Petrovna of her few last happy moments. What should he say to her? How should he prepare her? Iván Golubenko lost his head entirely. He had had already time enough to curse in his thoughts all duels, all quarrels, every kind of heroism, and all kinds of so-called questions of honor, and he at last rose from his seat ready to confess or to run away. Silently and quickly he caught the hand of Pelageia Petrovna, and stooping over it to touch it with his lips, thus hid his face, over which a torrent of tears suddenly streamed down; impetuously, without another thought, he ran out into the corridor, snatching his great coat, and then out of the house without having said a word. Pelageia Petrovna looked after him with astonishment, and thought: “He also must be in love, poor fellow--Well, that is their young sorrow--before happiness!” ... And she soon forgot him, absorbed in her dreams of the happiness which seemed to her so inviolable and entire. BOLESS BY MAXIM GORKI [Illustration] _Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov, otherwise “Gorki,” or the “Bitter One,” was born in 1868, in the house of his grandfather, the dyer Kaschirin. A shoemaker’s apprentice at five years of age, his life has been a continued series of experiments and struggles--at one time gardener, at another, painter of icons, scullery boy on a Volga steamship, shoemaker, sawyer of wood, apple-seller, baker, and railroad porter. His first pictures of the life of the under-dog, based on his own experiences, were so masterly that he became in a surprisingly short time one of the most popular of Russian authors._ [Illustration] BOLESS BY MAXIM GORKI