After the “concert” they sang “May our lips be filled with praise,” and the choir practice was over.  The choir broke up to reassemble in the evening for another practice.  And so it went on every day.

One month passed and then a second. . . .  The steward, too, had by then received a notice that the Count would soon be coming.  At last the dusty sun-blinds were taken off the windows of the big house, and Yefremovo heard the strains of the broken-down, out-of-tune piano.  Father Kuzma was pining, though he could not himself have said why, or whether it was from delight or alarm. . . .  The deacon went about grinning.

The following Saturday evening Father Kuzma went to the sacristan’s lodgings.  His face was pale, his shoulders drooped, the lilac of his cassock looked faded.

“I have just been at his Excellency’s,” he said to the sacristan, stammering.  “He is a cultivated gentleman with refined ideas.  But . . . er . . . it’s mortifying, brother. . . .  ’At what o’clock, your Excellency, do you desire us to ring for Mass to-morrow?’ And he said:  ’As you think best.  Only, couldn’t it be as short and quick as possible without a choir.’  Without a choir!  Er . . . do you understand, without, without a choir. . . .”

Alexey Alexeitch turned crimson.  He would rather have spent two hours on his knees again than have heard those words!  He did not sleep all night.  He was not so much mortified at the waste of his labours as at the fact that the deacon would give him no peace now with his jeers.  The deacon was delighted at his discomfiture.  Next day all through the service he was casting disdainful glances towards the choir where Alexey Alexeitch was booming responses in solitude.  When he passed by the choir with the censer he muttered: 

“Perform your music!  Do your utmost!  The Count will give a ten-rouble note to the choir!”

After the service the sacristan went home, crushed and ill with mortification.  At the gate he was overtaken by the red-faced deacon.

“Stop a minute, Alyosha!” said the deacon.  “Stop a minute, silly, don’t be cross!  You are not the only one, I am in for it too!  Immediately after the Mass Father Kuzma went up to the Count and asked:  ’And what did you think of the deacon’s voice, your Excellency.  He has a deep bass, hasn’t he?’ And the Count—­do you know what he answered by way of compliment?  ‘Anyone can bawl,’ he said.  ’A man’s voice is not as important as his brains.’  A learned gentleman from Petersburg!  An atheist is an atheist, and that’s all about it!  Come, brother in misfortune, let us go and have a drop to drown our troubles!”

And the enemies went out of the gate arm-in-arm.

NERVES