"Did you tell my master about the icon?"
"I did," he answered in a melancholy voice; "I can keep nothing back, brother."
This utterly confounded me, and I sat on the floor staring at him stupidly, while he muttered hurriedly, confusedly, desperately miserable:
"You see your man guessed—or rather, mine guessed and told yours—"
I thought I was lost. These people had been conspiring against me, and now there was a place ready for me in the colony for youthful criminals! If that were so, nothing mattered! If one must drown, it is better to drown in a deep spot. I put a breviary into the hands of the shopman; he hid it in the sleeves of his greatcoat and went away. But he returned suddenly, the breviary fell at my feet, and the man strode away, saying:
"I won't take it! It would be all over with you." I did not understand these words. Why should it be all over with me? But I was very glad that he had not taken the book. After this my little shopman began to regard me with more disfavor and suspicion than ever.
I remembered all this when Larionich went upstairs. He did not stay there long, and came back more depressed and quiet than usual, but before supper he said to me privately:
"I tried to arrange for you to be set free from the shop, and given over to the workshop, but it was no good. Kouzma would not have it. You are very much out of favor with him."
I had an enemy in the house, too—the shopman's fiancée, an immoderately sportive damsel. All the young fellows in the workshop played about with her; they used to wait for her in the vestibule and embrace her. This did not offend her; she only squeaked like a little dog. She was chewing something from morning to night; her pockets were always full of gingerbread or buns; her jaws moved ceaselessly. To look at her vacant face with its restless gray eyes was unpleasant. She used to ask Pavl and me riddles which always concealed some coarse obscenity, and repeated catchwords which, being said very quickly, became improper words.
One day one of the elderly workmen said to her: