It was between eight and nine o’clock in the evening.  Overhead, on the second storey, someone was walking up and down, and on the floor above that four hands were playing scales.  The pacing of the man overhead who, to judge from his nervous step, was thinking of something harassing, or was suffering from toothache, and the monotonous scales gave the stillness of the evening a drowsiness that disposed to lazy reveries.  In the nursery, two rooms away, the governess and Seryozha were talking.

“Pa-pa has come!” carolled the child.  “Papa has co-ome.  Pa!  Pa!  Pa!”

“Votre pere 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!”