one could see in the boy a man who fulfilled his duty to the end.  At times father could not understand him and would simply send him away to play or to sleep—­Yura never felt offended and went away with a feeling of great satisfaction.  He did not feel the need of being understood; he even feared it.  At times he would not tell under any circumstances why he was crying; at times he would make believe that he was absent minded, that he heard nothing, that he was occupied with his own affairs, but he heard and understood.

And he had a terrible secret.  He had noticed that these extraordinary and charming people, father and mother, were sometimes unhappy and were hiding this from everybody.  Therefore he was also concealing his discovery, and gave everybody the impression that all was well.  Many times he found mamma crying somewhere in a corner in the drawing room, or in the bedroom—­his own room was next to her bedroom—­and one night, very late, almost at dawn, he heard the terribly loud and angry voice of father and the weeping voice of mother.  He lay a long time, holding his breath, but then he was so terrified by that unusual conversation in the middle of the night that he could not restrain himself and he asked his nurse in a soft voice: 

“What are they saying?”

And the nurse answered quickly in a whisper: 

“Sleep, sleep.  They are not saying anything.”

“I am coming over to your bed.”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?  Such a big boy!”

“I am coming over to your bed.”

Thus, terribly afraid lest they should be heard, they spoke in whispers and argued in the dark; and the end was that Yura moved over to nurse’s bed, upon her rough, but cosy and warm blanket.

In the morning papa and mamma were very cheerful and Yura pretended that he believed them and it seemed that he really did believe them.  But that same evening, and perhaps it was another evening, he noticed his father crying.  It happened in the following way:  He was passing his father’s study, and the door was half open; he heard a noise and he looked in quietly—­father lay face downward upon his couch and cried aloud.  There was no one else in the room.  Yura went away, turned about in his room and came back—­the door was still half open, no one but father was in the room, and he was still sobbing.  If he cried quietly, Yura could understand it, but he sobbed loudly, he moaned in a heavy voice and his teeth were gnashing terribly.  He lay there, covering the entire couch, hiding his head under his broad shoulders, sniffing heavily—­and that was beyond his understanding.  And on the table, on the large table covered with pencils, papers and a wealth of other things, stood the lamp burning with a red flame, and smoking—­a flat, greyish black strip of smoke was coming out and bending in all directions.