“Oh, awfully! For the last moments, hours indeed, he never left off screaming. For three days and nights in succession he screamed incessantly. It was insufferable. I can’t understand how I bore it; one could hear it through three closed doors. Ah, what I suffered!”

“And was he really conscious?” asked Pyotr Ivanovitch.

“Yes,” she whispered, “up to the last minute. He said goodbye to us a quarter of an hour before his death, and asked Volodya to be taken away too.”