oking at his bent, wasted body and hearing his heavy, noisy sighs,
I thought of an unhappy, bitter life of which the confession had
been made to me that day, and I felt uneasy and frightened at my
blissful mood. I came down the knoll and went to the house.

"Life, as he thinks, is terrible," I thought, "so don't stand on
ceremony with it, bend it to your will, and until it crushes you,
snatch all you can wring from it."

Marya Sergeyevna was standing on the verandah. I put my arms round
her without a word, and began greedily kissing her eyebrows, her
temples, her neck. . . .

In my room she told me she had loved me for a long time, more than
a year. She vowed eternal love, cried and begged me to take her
away with me. I repeatedly took her to the window to look at her
face in the moonlight, and she seemed to me a lovely dream, and I
made haste to hold her tight to convince myself of the truth of it.
It was long since I had known such raptures. . . . Yet somewhere
far away at the bottom of my heart I felt an awkwardness, and I was
ill at ease. In her love for me there was something incongruous and
burdensome, just as in Dmitri Petrovitch's friendship. It was a
great, serious passion with tears and vows, and I wanted nothing
serious in it--no tears, no vows, no talk of the future. Let that
moonlight night flash through our lives like a meteor and--_basta!_

At three o'clock she went out of my room, and, while I was standing
in the doorway, looking after her, at the end of the corridor Dmitri
Petrovitch suddenly made his appearance; she started and stood aside
to let him pass, and her whole figure was expressive of repulsion.
He gave a strange smile, coughed, and came into my room.

"I forgot my cap here yesterday," he said without looking at me.

He found it and, holding it in both hands, put it on his head; then
he looked at my confused face, at my slippers, and said in a strange,
husky voice unlike his own:

"I suppose it must be my fate that I should understand nothing. . . .
If you understand anything, I congratulate you. It's all darkness
before my eyes."

And he went out, clearing his throat. Afterwards from the window I
saw him by the stable, harnessing the horses with his own hands.
His hands were trembling, he was in nervous haste and kept looking
round at the house; probably he was feeling terror. Then he got
into the gig, and, with a strange expression as though afraid of
being pursued, lashed the hor