He blinked, went red, got up and sat down again, struggling with himself to do what was for him the most difficult thing in life--to say an unpleasant thing to a man's face, to say what the other, whoever he might be, did not expect.

He was so used to submitting to Prince Vasili's tone of careless self-assurance that he felt he would be unable to withstand it now, but he also felt that on what he said now his future depended--whether he would follow the same old road, or that new path so attractively shown him by the Masons, on which he firmly believed he would be reborn to a new life.

"Now, dear boy," said Prince Vasili playfully, "say 'yes,' and I'll write to her myself, and we will kill the fatted calf.

" But before Prince Vasili had finished his playful speech, Pierre, without looking at him, and with a kind of fury that made him like his father, muttered in a whisper: "Prince, I did not ask you here.