"'Good-by, Grisha. I want to live very much, but it is impossible! It is terrible! I can't! I can't!'" I remember that he talked very, very fast, as if he were running away from the past, while I listened and looked at the stove. Its brow was before me and it looked like some ancient and blind face whose black mouth licked with flames ate up the whistling and hissing wood. I saw Grisha's sister in the fire and thought bitterly: "Why do people violate and destroy one another?" Grisha's thick words fell one upon the other like dry leaves in autumn: "My father almost went out of his senses. He stamped his feet and cried: 'She has insulted her parents! Her soul is lost.' Only after the burial, when he saw that all of Kazan followed Liza's body and laid wreaths upon her tomb, did he come to himself. 'If all the people are for her,' he said, 'it means that I behaved like a scoundrel toward my child!'" Grisha wept and dried his glasses, and his hands trembled. "Even before this misfortune befell us I wanted to enter a monastery, and I had said to my father: "'Let me.' "But he swore at me and beat me. Nevertheless, I said firmly: "'I will not do business. Let me go.' "He was frightened by Liza's death, and gave me freedom, and now, in these four years, I have lived in three monasteries, and everywhere there is barter, and I have no place for my soul. They sell God's earth and God's word, His honey and His miracles. I cannot stand it any longer!" His story awoke my soul again, for I did little thinking while I lived in the monastery. I was so worn out by my labors, that _my_ rebellious thought slumbered. Suddenly his words woke me. I asked Grisha: "Where, then, is our God? There is nothing around us but the arbitrary and mad foolishness of man; nothing but the petty deceptions from which misfortunes arise. Where, then, is God?" But here Misha appeared and drove us out. From that day Grisha came to me often, and I told him my thoughts, which horrified him, and he counseled humility: "But why do people suffer so?" I asked. "For their sins," he answered. To him everything came from the hands of God--famine, fire, violent death and floods--everything. "Can it be that God is the sower of misfortune on earth?" I asked. "Remember Job, insane one," he whispered to me. "Job has nothing to do with me," I answered. "I in his place would have said to God, 'Do not frighten me, but answer me clearly: Where is the way that leads to Thee? Am I not Thy son, made in Thy image? Don't lower Thyself to repulse Thy child.'" Often Grisha wept at the foolishness of my audacity, and embracing me, he said: "My dear brother, I am frightened for you--terribly frightened. Your words and your reasonings are from the devil." "I do not believe in the devil, for God is all-powerful." Then he became even more excited. He was a pure and tender man, and I loved him. CHAPTER X It was at this time that I performed the penance.