“At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself,” said the student, stretching out his hands to the fire, “so it must have been cold then, too.  Ah, what a terrible night it must have been, granny!  An utterly dismal long night!”

He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and asked: 

“No doubt you have been at the reading of the Twelve Gospels?”

“Yes, I have,” answered Vasilisa.

“If you remember at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, ’I am ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.’  And our Lord answered him thus:  ’I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.’  After the supper Jesus went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy and he could not struggle against sleep.  He fell asleep.  Then you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors.  They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind....  He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how He was beaten...”

Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the student.

“They came to the high priest’s,” he went on; “they began to question Jesus, and meantime the labourers made a fire in the yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves.  Peter, too, stood with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing.  A woman, seeing him, said:  ’He was with Jesus, too’—­that is as much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned.  And all the labourers that were standing near the fire must have looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused and said:  ‘I don’t know Him.’  A little while after again someone recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples and said:  ’Thou, too, art one of them,’ but again he denied it.  And for the third time someone turned to him:  ‘Why, did I not see thee with Him in the garden to-day?’ For the third time he denied it.  And immediately after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the evening....  He remembered, he came to himself, went out of the yard and wept bitterly—­bitterly.  In the Gospel it is written:  ‘He went out and wept bitterly.’  I imagine it:  the still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly audible, smothered sobbing...”

T he student sighed and sank into thought.  Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably at the student, flushed crimson, and her expression became strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.