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Tichon remembered the thoughts that had thronged his mind during the night, and he felt in his soul a calm determination not to return to Pastor Glück, but to escape with Cornelius.

The storm had shifted the barge and its bow was now touching the raft where the conversation about Antichrist had taken place last night. Ivan had found time to get his sleep and he was again sitting in the same place as last night singing the same song. And music, (or was it only phantom music?) the sounds of the minuet subdued by the mist:—

’Tis time to cast thy bow away,

Cupid, we all are in thy sway.

mingled with Ivan’s melancholy, drawling song, as, his face turned to the east and the dawn, he sang of the eternal setting, the end of all days:

Hollowed oak trunks, ye will prove

Fit house for us, who on earth did move,

Night approacheth, endeth Day,

And cruel Death his scythe doth lay

To the root of all that live!

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On the banks of the Neva, near the Church of Mary the Mother of all the Sorrowing, next to the house belonging to the Tsarevitch Alexis, stood that of Tsaritsa Martha, the widow of Tsar Peter’s stepbrother Fédor. Fédor died when Peter was ten years old. The Tsaritsa, eighteen at the time of her wedding, had been married only four weeks. The death of her husband sent her out of her mind and she spent thirty-three years in seclusion. She never left her apartments, and neither knew nor saw anybody. At foreign courts she was believed to be dead long since. Petersburg she had only caught sight of through her windows: its whitewashed huts, built after the Dutch and Prussian manner, its church spires, the Neva with its barges and rafts seemed to her an absurd nightmare. Dreams were her reality.