The two old men convulsively clasped each other in their arms, exchanged warm kisses and then stepped apart. The wrinkles of the older man quivered, the lean face of the younger was immobile, almost stern. The kisses had changed nothing in the external side of this scene, only Lubov burst into a sob of joy, and Foma awkwardly moved about in his seat, feeling as though his breath were failing him. “Eh, children, you are wounds to the heart--you are not its joy,” complained Yakov Tarasovich in a ringing voice, and he evidently invested a great deal in these words, for immediately after he had pronounced them he became radiant, more courageous, and he said briskly, addressing himself to his daughter: “Well, have you melted with joy? You had better go and prepare something for us--tea and so forth. We’ll entertain the prodigal son. You must have forgotten, my little old man, what sort of a man your father is?” Taras Mayakin scrutinized his parent with a meditative look of his large eyes and he smiled, speechless, clad in black, wherefore the gray hair on his head and in his beard told more strikingly. “Well, be seated. Tell me--how have you lived, what have you done? What are you looking at? Ah! That’s my godson. Ignat Gordyeeff’s son, Foma. Do you remember Ignat?” “I remember everything,” said Taras. “Oh! That’s good, if you are not bragging. Well, are you married?” “I am a widower.” “Have you any children?” “They died. I had two.” “That’s a pity. I would have had grandchildren.” “May I smoke?” asked Taras. “Go ahead. Just look at him, you’re smoking cigars.” “Don’t you like them?” “I? Come on, it’s all the same to me. I say that it looks rather aristocratic to smoke cigars.” “And why should we consider ourselves lower than the aristocrats?” said Taras, laughing. “Do, I consider ourselves lower?” exclaimed the old man. “I merely said it because it looked ridiculous to me, such a sedate old fellow, with beard trimmed in foreign fashion, cigar in his mouth. Who is he? My son--he-he-he!” the old man tapped Taras on the shoulder and sprang away from him, as though frightened lest he were rejoicing too soon, lest that might not be the proper way to treat that half gray man. And he looked searchingly and suspiciously into his son’s large eyes, which were surrounded by yellowish swellings. Taras smiled in his father’s face an affable and warm smile, and said to him thoughtfully: “That’s the way I remember you--cheerful and lively. It looks as though you had not changed a bit during all these years.” The old man straightened himself proudly, and, striking his breast with his fist, said: “I shall never change, because life has no power over him who knows his own value. Isn’t that so?” “Oh! How proud you are!” “I must have taken after my son,” said the old man with a cunning grimace. “Do you know, dear, my son was silent for seventeen years out of pride.” “That’s because his father would not listen to him,” Taras reminded him.