"Yes--It's
impossible to speak to them, absolutely impossible! They cannot
understand!"
"They came, snatched, and carried off!" mumbled the mother, waving
her hands. As her son remained at home, her heart began to beat
more lightly. Her mind stubbornly halted before one fact and
refused to be moved. "How he scoffs at us, that yellow ruffian!
How he threatens us!"
"All right, mamma!" Pavel suddenly said with resolution. "Let us
pick all this up!"
He called her "mamma," the word he used only when he came nearer to
her. She approached him, looked into his face, and asked softly:
"Did they insult you?"
"Yes," he answered. "That's--hard! I would rather have gone with them."
It seemed to her that she saw tears in his eyes, and wishing to soothe
him, with an indistinct sense of his pain, she said with a sigh:
"Wait a while--they'll take you, too!"
"They will!" he replied.
After a pause the mother remarked sorrowfully:
"How hard you are, Pasha! If you'd only reassure me once in a while!
But you don't. When I say something horrible, you say something worse."
He looked at her, moved closer to her, and said gently:
"I cannot, mamma! I cannot lie! You have to get used to it.
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