the lawyers and your secretary, that I
shall never forget their help! And now, old fellow, let us embrace
one another and kiss for the last time!"

Ognev, limp with emotion, kissed the old man once more and began
going down the steps. On the last step he looked round and asked:
"Shall we meet again some day?"

"God knows!" said the old man. "Most likely not!"

"Yes, that's true! Nothing will tempt you to Petersburg and I am
never likely to turn up in this district again. Well, good-bye!"

"You had better leave the books behind!" Kuznetsov called after
him. "You don't want to drag such a weight with you. I would send
them by a servant to-morrow!"

But Ognev was rapidly walking away from the house and was not
listening. His heart, warmed by the wine, was brimming over with
good-humour, friendliness, and sadness. He walked along thinking
how frequently one met with good people, and what a pity it was
that nothing was left of those meetings but memories. At times one
catches a glimpse of cranes on the horizon, and a faint gust of
wind brings their plaintive, ecstatic cry, and a minute later,
however greedily one scans the blue distance, one cannot see a speck
nor catch a sound; and like that, people with their faces and their
words flit through our lives and are drowned in the past, leaving
nothing except faint traces in the memory. Having been in the N----
District from the early spring, and having been almost every day
at the friendly Kuznetsovs', Ivan Alexeyitch had become as much at
home with the old man, his daughter, and the servants as though
they were his own people; he had grown familiar with the whole house
to the smallest detail, with the cosy verandah, the windings of the
avenues, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the
bath-house; but as soon as he was out of the gate all this would
be changed to memory and would lose its meaning as reality for ever,
and in a year or two all these dear images would grow as dim in his
consciousness as stories he had read or things he had imagined.

"Nothing in life is so precious as people!" Ognev thought in his
emotion, as he strode along the avenue to the gate. "Nothing!"

It was warm and still in the garden. There was a scent of the
mignonette, of the tobacco-plants, and of the heliotrope, which
were not yet over in the flower-beds. The spaces between the bushes
and the tree-trunks were filled with a fine soft mist soaked through
and through with moonl