their sick hearts grieved, wept, and rejoiced apart. But there was a something in their thoughts which fused their hearts in one, and annihilated that bottomless abyss which separates man from man and makes him so lonely, unhappy, and weak. The father with an unconscious motion put his arm around the neck of his son, and the son's head rested equally without conscious volition upon his father's consumptive chest.
"She it was who gave it to thee, was it not?" whispered the father, without taking his eyes off the little angel.
At another time Sashka would have replied with a rude negation, but now the only reply possible resounded of itself within his soul, and he calmly pronounced the pious fraud: "Who else? of course she did."
The father made no reply, and Sashka relapsed into silence.
Something grated in the adjoining room, then clicked, and then was silent for a moment, and then noisily and hurriedly the clock struck "One, two, three."
"Sashka, do you ever dream?" asked the father in a meditative tone.
"No! Oh, yes," he admitted, "once I had one, in which I fell down from the roof. We were climbing after the pigeons, and I fell down."
"But I dream always. Strange things are dreams. One sees the whole past, one loves and suffers as though it were reality."
