“Then do not go to see him. Why should you?”

“Ah, I might reply, Why have I come to see you? All I know is that I have come. You see, he has only to say to me, ‘Pray, pray,’ and at once I find myself rising in the middle of the night, and going to pray for a long, long time—yes, for whole hours together. Often I feel half-dead for want of sleep, yet am kept awake by my terror. At such times storm-clouds seem to be gathering to destroy me, and an unknown calamity seems to be threatening my life. It is as though wicked people were conspiring to kill me, and all the saints and the angels were refusing to protect me. Then I return to my prayers, my prayers, my endless prayers, until at length a look of pity dawns on the face of the image of the Madonna, and I go back to my bed feeling almost like a dead woman. And sometimes I fall asleep on the floor where I am kneeling before the ikon, and it is he himself who first awakens me. He calls to me, caresses and reassures me, and then I feel better. Yes, I feel strong again in his presence, and fear evil things no longer. In him there is power; in what he says there is virtue.”

“But of what evil are you afraid? Of what kind of evil?”

Katerina grew paler still, until to Ordynov she looked like a woman who has been condemned to death, and has no hope of reprieve.

“Of what evil am I afraid?” she re-echoed. “Do you not know that I am a thing accursed—that I have killed a soul—that my own mother has cursed me—that I was the cause of my own mother’s death?”

Ordynov silently embraced her, and she pressed herself to his side with a convulsive shudder.

“Yes, it was I who caused her death,” she went on with a shudder at her visions of the irremediable past. “I have long wanted to tell that to some one, but have always been forbidden to do so; he has always bound me to silence on the subject, although it is through his reproaches, through his fits of rage, that I am constantly made to renew my sufferings. He is my implacable foe, my murderer. In the nighttime all things come back to me, even as they are doing now. Listen to me—listen! All that I am telling you happened a long while ago—ever such a long, long while ago. I do not so much as know when it happened, although I am for ever seeing it like a vision of yesterday, like a dream which has been pressing upon one’s heart since overnight. Trouble, as you know, makes time as nothing. . . . Press me closer to you, closer to you, and let me tell you all my misfortunes; and if you can free me from them—free me whom my own mother has cursed!—I will give you my very life.”