“Votre père vous appelle, allez vite!” cried the governess, shrill as a frightened bird. “I am speaking to you!”

“What am I to say to him, though?” Yevgeny Petrovitch wondered.

But before he had time to think of anything whatever his son Seryozha, a boy of seven, walked into the study.

He was a child whose sex could only have been guessed from his dress: weakly, white-faced, and fragile. He was limp like a hot-house plant, and everything about him seemed extraordinarily soft and tender: his movements, his curly hair, the look in his eyes, his velvet jacket.

“Good evening, papa!” he said, in a soft voice, clambering on to his father’s knee and giving him a rapid kiss on his neck. “Did you send for me?”

“Excuse me, Sergey Yevgenitch,” answered the prosecutor, removing him from his knee. “Before kissing we must have a talk, and a serious talk…I am angry with you, and don’t love you any more. I tell you, my boy, I don’t love you, and you are no son of mine.…”

Seryozha looked intently at his father, then shifted his eyes to the table, and shrugged his shoulders.

“What have I done to you?” he asked in perplexity, blinking. “I haven’t been in your study all day, and I haven’t touched anything.”

“Natalya Semyonovna has just been complaining to me that you have been smoking.…Is it true? Have you been smoking?”

“Yes, I did smoke once.…That’s true.…”

“Now you see you are lying as well,” said the prosecutor, frowning to disguise a smile. “Natalya Semyonovna has seen you smoking twice. So you see you have been detected in three misdeeds: smoking, taking someone else’s tobacco, and lying. Three faults.”

“Oh yes,” Seryozha recollected, and his eyes smiled. “That’s true, that’s true; I smoked twice: to-day and before.”

“So you see it was not once, but twice.…I am very, very much displeased with you! You used to be a good boy, but now I see you are spoilt and have become a bad one.”

Yevgeny Petrovitch smoothed down Seryozha’s collar and thought:

“What more am I to say to him!”

“Yes, it’s not right,” he continued. “I did not expect it of you. In the first place, you ought not to take tobacco that does not belong to you. Every person has only the right to make use of his own property; if he takes anyone else’s…he is a bad man!” (“I am not saying the right thing!” thought Yevgeny Petrovitch.) “For instance, Natalya Semyonovna has a box with her clothes in it. That’s her box, and we—that is, you and I—dare not touch it, as it is not ours. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ve got toy horses and pictures.…I don’t take them, do I? Perhaps I might like to take them, but…they are not mine, but yours!”

“Take them if you like!” said Seryozha, raising his eyebrows. “Please don’t hesitate, papa, take them! That yellow dog on your table is mine, but I don’t mind.…Let it stay.”

“You don’t understand me,” said Bykovsky. “You have given me the dog, it is mine now and I can do what I like with it; but I didn’t give you the tobacco! The tobacco is mine.” (“I am not explaining properly!”