Then his voice broke again, and he bowed his head. But when he raised his eyes, dumb horror froze his heart and the hair stood up on his head.
Katerina was sitting pale as a sheet. She was looking with a fixed stare into the air, her lips were blue as a corpse's and her eyes were dimmed by a mute, agonising woe. She stood up slowly, took two steps forward and, with a piercing wail, flung herself down before the ikon. . . . Jerky, incoherent words broke from her throat. She lost consciousness. Shaken with horror Ordynov lifted her up and carried her to his bed; he stood over her, frantic. A minute later she opened her eyes, sat up in the bed, looked about her and seized his hand. She drew him towards her, tried to whisper something with her lips that were still pale, but her voice would not obey her. At last she burst into a flood of tears; the hot drops scalded Ordynov's chilly hand.
"It's hard for me, it's hard for me now; my last hour is at hand!" she said at last in desperate anguish.
She tried to say something else, but her faltering tongue could not utter a word. She looked in despair at Ordynov, who did not understand her. He bent closer to her and listened. . . . At last he heard her whisper distinctly:
"I am corrupted—they have corrupted me, they have ruined me!"
Ordynov lifted his head and looked at her in wild amazement. Some hideous thought flashed across his mind. Katerina saw the convulsive workings of his face.
"Yes! Corrupted," she went on; "a wicked man corrupted me. It is he who has ruined me! . . . I have sold my soul to him. Why, why did you speak of my mother? Why did you want to torture me? God, God be your judge! . . ."
A minute later she was softly weeping; Ordynow's heart was beating and aching in mortal anguish.
"He says," she whispered in a restrained, mysterious voice, "that when he dies he will come and fetch my sinful soul. . . . I am his, I have sold my soul to him. He tortures me, he reads to me in his books. Here, look at his book! here is his book. He says I have committed the unpardonable sin. Look, look . . ."
And she showed him a book. Ordynov did not notice where it had come from. He took it mechanically—it was all in manuscript like the old heretical books which he had happened to see before, but now he was incapable of looking or concentrating
