These words, which summed up the horrible situation, came as a relief for Feodor.  Yes, they must know.  Koupriane was right.  She must speak.  He ordered his daughter to tell everything, everything.

Natacha fixed Koupriane again with her look of hatred to the death, turned from him and repeated in a firm voice: 

“I have nothing to say.”

“There is the accomplice of your assassins,” growled Koupriane then, his arm extended.

Natacha uttered a cry like a wounded beast and fell at her father’s feet.  She gathered them within her supplicating arms.  She pressed them to her breasts.  She sobbed from the bottom of her heart.  And he, not comprehending, let her lie there, distant, hostile, somber.  Then she moaned, distractedly, and wept bitterly, and the dramatic atmosphere in which she thus suddenly enveloped Feodor made it all sound like those cries of an earlier time when the all-powerful, punishing father appeared in the women’s apartments to punish the culpable ones.

“My father!  Dear Father!  Look at me!  Look at me!  Have pity on me, and do not require me to speak when I must be silent forever.  And believe me!  Do not believe these men!  Do not believe Matrena Petrovna.  And am I not your daughter?  Your very own daughter!  Your Natacha Feodorovna!  I cannot make things dear to you.  No, no, by the Holy Virgin Mother of Jesus I cannot explain.  By the holy ikons, it is because I must not.  By my mother, whom I have not known and whose place you have taken, oh, my father, ask me nothing more!  Ask me nothing more!  But take me in your arms as you did when I was little; embrace me, dear father; love me.  I never have had such need to be loved.  Love me!  I am miserable.  Unfortunate me, who cannot even kill myself before your eyes to prove my innocence and my love.  Papa, Papa!  What will your arms be for in the days left you to live, if you no longer wish to press me to your heart?  Papa!  Papa!”

She laid her head on Feodor’s knees.  Her hair had come down and hung about her in a magnificent disorderly mass of black.

“Look in my eyes!  Look in my eyes!  See how they love you, Batouchka!  Batouchka!  My dear Batouchka!”

Then Feodor wept.  His great tears fell upon Natacha’s tears.  He raised her head and demanded simply in a broken voice: 

“You can tell me nothing now?  But when will you tell me?”

Natacha lifted her eyes to his, then her look went past him toward heaven, and from her lips came just one word, in a sob: 

“Never.”

Matrena Petrovna, Koupriane and the reporter shuddered before the high and terrible thing that happened then.  Feodor had taken his daughter’s face between his hands.  He looked long at those eyes raised toward heaven, the mouth which had just uttered the word “Never,” then, slowly, his rude lips went to the tortured, quivering lips of the girl.  He held her close.  She raised her head wildly, triumphantly, and cried, with arm extended toward Matrena Petrovna: