“I will come again to-morrow,” he said, pressing the mother’s cold hand. “You go to bed.”

After putting on his greatcoat in the passage and picking up his walking-stick, he stopped, thought a minute, and went back into the drawing-room.

“I’ll come to-morrow, Olga,” he repeated in a quivering voice. “Do you hear?”

She did not answer, and it seemed as though grief had robbed her of all power of speech. In his greatcoat and with his stick still in his hand, the doctor sat down beside her, and began in a soft, tender half-whisper, which was utterly out of keeping with his heavy, dignified figure:

“Olga! For the sake of your sorrow which I share. … Now, when falsehood is criminal, I beseech you to tell me the truth. You have always declared that the boy is my son. Is that the truth?”

Olga Ivanovna was silent.

“You have been the one attachment in my life,” the doctor went on, “and you cannot imagine how deeply my feeling is wounded by falsehood. … Come, I entreat you, Olga, for once in your life, tell me the truth. … At these moments one cannot lie. Tell me that Misha is not my son. I am waiting.”

“He is.”

Olga Ivanovna’s face could not be seen, but in her voice the doctor could hear hesitation. He sighed.

“Even at such moments you can bring yourself to tell a lie,” he said in his ordinary voice. “There is nothing sacred to you! Do listen, do understand me. … You have been the one only attachment in my life. Yes, you were depraved, vulgar, but I have loved no one else but you in my life. That trivial love, now that I am growing old, is the one solitary bright spot in my memories. Why do you darken it with deception? What is it for?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Oh my God!” cried Tsvyetkov. “You are lying, you understand very well!” he cried more loudly, and he began pacing about the drawing-room, angrily waving his stick. “Or have you forgotten? Then I will remind you! A father’s rights to the boy are equally shared with me by Petrov and Kurovsky the lawyer, who still make you an allowance for their son’s education, just as I do! Yes, indeed! I know all that quite well! I forgive your lying in the past, what does it matter? But now when you have grown older, at this moment when the boy is dying, your lying stifles me! How sorry I am that I cannot speak, how sorry I am!”

The doctor unbuttoned his overcoat, and still pacing about, said:

“Wretched woman! Even such moments have no effect on her! Even now she lies as freely as nine years ago in the Hermitage Restaurant! She is afraid if she tells me the truth I shall leave off giving her money, she thinks that if she did not lie I should not love the boy! You are lying! It’s contemptible!”

The doctor rapped the floor with his stick, and cried:

“It’s loathsome. Warped, corrupted creature! I must despise you, and I ought to be ashamed of my feeling. Yes! Your lying has stuck in my throat these nine years, I have endured it, but now it’s too much—too much.”

From the dark corner where Olga Ivanovna was sitting there came the sound of weeping. The doctor ceased speaking and cleared his throat. A silence followed. The doctor slowly buttoned up his overcoat, and began looking for his hat which he had dropped as he walked about.