Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/205

Rh "It must have been terrible to go by night when she lay there murdered! I should have run away!"

And he took a firmer grip of my two fingers. We had halted in the thicket, back of the threshing-floors, at the very end of the village. Semka picked up a dry branch from out of the snow, and began to strike the frost-covered bole of a linden. The hoar-frost fell from the branches, on his cap, and the echo rang through the forest.

"Lyof Nikolayevitch," said Fedka (I supposed that he was going to speak of the countess again), "what is the good of learning to sing? I often wonder, I really do, why we sing."

he leaped from the terrible murder of the countess to that question, God only knows; but everything—the sound of his voice, the seriousness with which he asked the question, the silent interest of the other two—made it evident that there was a legitimate and vital connection between this question and the conversation that had preceded. Whether this connection lay in the fact that he responded to my explanation that the crime was rendered possible by lack of education,—I had spoken to them of that,—or because he verified it in himself, as he transported himself into the mind of the murderer, and remembered his favorite occupation (he had a wonderful voice, and a great talent for music), or whether he connection consisted in the fact that he felt that now was the time for perfect honesty of expression, and all the questions that demanded elucidation arose in his mind; at all events, his question did not surprise any of us.

"But why have drawing? why learn to write well?" I asked, for I really did not know how to explain to him the advantage of art.