ame, he went out into the
fields.

He was only twenty-seven, but he was already stout. He dressed like
an old man in loose, roomy clothes, and suffered from asthma. He
already seemed to be developing the characteristics of an elderly
country bachelor. He never fell in love, never thought of marriage,
and loved no one but his mother, his sister, his old nurse, and the
gardener, Vassilitch. He was fond of good fare, of his nap after
dinner, and of talking about politics and exalted subjects. He had
in his day taken his degree at the university, but he now looked
upon his studies as though in them he had discharged a duty incumbent
upon young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five; at any
rate, the ideas which now strayed every day through his mind had
nothing in common with the university or the subjects he had studied
there.

In the fields it was hot and still, as though rain were coming. It
was steaming in the wood, and there was a heavy fragrant scent from
the pines and rotting leaves. Pyotr Mihalitch stopped several times
and wiped his wet brow. He looked at his winter corn and his spring
oats, walked round the clover-field, and twice drove away a partridge
with its chicks which had strayed in from the wood. And all the
while he was thinking that this insufferable state of things could
not go on for ever, and that he must end it one way or another. End
it stupidly, madly, but he must end it.

"But how? What can I do?" he asked himself, and looked imploringly
at the sky and at the trees, as though begging for their help.

But the sky and the trees were mute. His noble ideas were no help,
and his common sense whispered that the agonising question could
have no solution but a stupid one, and that to-day's scene with the
messenger was not the last one of its kind. It was terrible to think
what was in store for him!

As he returned home the sun was setting. By now it seemed to him
that the problem was incapable of solution. He could not accept the
accomplished fact, and he could not refuse to accept it, and there
was no intermediate course. When, taking off his hat and fanning
himself with his handkerchief, he was walking along the road, and
had only another mile and a half to go before he would reach home,
he heard bells behind him. It was a very choice and successful
combination of bells, which gave a clear crystal note. No one had
such bells on his horses but the police captain, Medovsky, formerly
an o