In the evenings Jeremy came into the bar to Terenti as before; he conversed with the hunchback about God and Truth and the concerns of mankind. Since he had lived in the town the hunchback had become still more deformed; he seemed to have been bleached by his occupation. His eyes had got a dull, shy expression, and his body was as though melted in the hot vapours of the bar. His dirty shirt used to slip up on to his hump and leave his naked loins visible. All the time he was speaking with any one he kept both his hands behind his back, trying constantly to draw his shirt into its place, and this habit gave him the air of trying to stuff away his big hump. When Jeremy sat outside in the courtyard, Terenti would come out frequently on to the steps and look at him, and his eyes twitched as he shaded them with his hand. The straw-coloured beard quivered on his pointed face as he asked the old man in his weak voice, embarrassed as from a guilty conscience, "Grandfather! do you want anything?" "Many thanks. No--nothing. I don't need anything," the old man would answer. The hunchback turned slowly on his withered legs and went back into the bar. But the old man felt himself growing weaker every day. "It'll soon be all over with me," he said one day to Ilya, who was sitting near him. "It's time for me to die--there's only one thing still----" He peered round the courtyard mistrustfully and went on in a whisper: "I'm dying too soon, Ilyushka! My work is not done. I haven't had time. I've stored up money--money. I've pinched and saved for seventeen years; I wanted to build a church with it. I meant to make a temple for the Lord in the village--my home. Ah! there's need of it--such need for men to have a temple to God; our only refuge is with God. It's too little, all I've saved, it won't do it, and what shall I do with what I have? I don't know. O God! show me the way. And the ravens already flutter about me, and croak and smell a fat morsel. Listen, Ilyushka, I've got money; don't say a word to any one, but listen." Ilya listened; he felt himself uplifted as the sharer of a great important secret, and understood very well whom the old man spoke of as the ravens. A couple of days later when Ilya came back from school and went to his accustomed corner, he heard strange sounds in the old man's room. It was like some one murmuring--sobbing with a hoarse rattle in his throat, as though he were being strangled. Every now and then a whisper was audible. "Ksch! Ksch! Go away!" Full of anxiety the lad went to the door of the room, but it was fast shut. Then he cried out in a trembling voice: "Grandfather!" Behind the door the only answer he heard was a painful breathless whisper: "Tsch! Ksch! O Lord, have mercy--have mercy--have mercy!"