The class sat silent, cowed. None of the children could understand why Pavel Korchagin had been ejected, none but Sergei Bruzzhak, who was Pavel"s closest friend. He had seen him sprinkle a fistful of home-grown tobacco into the Easter cake dough in the priest"s kitchen where six backward pupils had waited for the priest to come and hear them repeat their lesson.

　　Now Pavel sat down on the bottom step of the school-house and wondered dismally what his mother would say when he told her what had happened, his poor hard-working mother who toiled from morning till night as cook at the excise inspector"s.