was always looking askance.  He had neither a smile nor a greeting for any one—­he was just like a stone!  If I undertook to interrogate him, he would either remain silent or snarl.  I began to wonder whether he had taken to drink—­which God forbid!—­or had conceived a passion for cards; or whether something in the line of a weakness for women had happened to him.  In youth love-longings act powerfully,—­well, and in such a large city as Moscow bad examples and occasions are not lacking.  But no; nothing of that sort was discernible.  His drink was kvas[22] and water; he never looked at the female sex—­and had no intercourse with people in general.  And what was most bitter of all to me, he did not have his former confidence in me; a sort of indifference had made its appearance, just as though everything belonging to him had become loathsome to him.  I turned the conversation on the sciences, on the university, but even there could get no real answer.  He went to church, but he was not devoid of peculiarities there also; everywhere he was grim and scowling, but in church he seemed always to be grinning.

After this fashion he spent six weeks with me, then went back to Moscow.  From Moscow he wrote to me twice, and it seemed to me, from his letters, as though he were regaining his sensibilities.  But picture to yourself my surprise, my dear sir!  Suddenly, in the very middle of the winter, just before the Christmas holidays, he presents himself before me!

“How didst thou get here?  How is this?  What’s the matter?  I know that thou hast no vacation at this time.—­Dost thou come from Moscow?”—­I ask.

“Yes.”

“And how about ... the university?”

“I have left the university.”

“Thou hast left it?”

“Just so.”

“For good?”

“For good.”

“But art thou ill, pray, Yakoff?”

“No, father,” says he, “I am not ill; but just don’t bother me and question me, dear father, or I will go away from here—­and that’s the last thou wilt ever see of me.”

Yakoff tells me that he is not ill, but his face is such that I am fairly frightened.  It was dreadful, dark—­not human, actually!—­His cheeks were drawn, his cheek-bones projected, he was mere skin and bone; his voice sounded as though it proceeded from a barrel ... while his eyes....  O Lord and Master! what eyes!—­menacing, wild, incessantly darting from side to side, and it was impossible to catch them; his brows were knit, his lips seemed to be twisted on one side....  What had happened to my Joseph Most Fair,[23] to my quiet lad?  I cannot comprehend it.  “Can he have gone crazy?” I say to myself.  He roams about like a spectre by night, he does not sleep,—­and then, all of a sudden, he will take to staring into a corner as though he were completely benumbed....  It was enough to scare one!

Although he had threatened to leave the house if I did not leave him in peace, yet surely I was his father!  My last hope was ruined—­yet I was to hold my tongue!  So one day, availing myself of an opportunity, I began to entreat Yakoff with tears, I began to adjure him by the memory of his dead mother: