at a
walk and then stopped his horse near the pond. He wanted to sit and
think without moving. The moon was rising and was reflected in a
streak of red on the other side of the pond. There were low rumbles
of thunder in the distance. Pyotr Mihalitch looked steadily at the
water and imagined his sister's despair, her martyr-like pallor,
the tearless eyes with which she would conceal her humiliation from
others. He imagined her with child, imagined the death of their
mother, her funeral, Zina's horror. . . . The proud, superstitious
old woman would be sure to die of grief. Terrible pictures of the
future rose before him on the background of smooth, dark water, and
among pale feminine figures he saw himself, a weak, cowardly man
with a guilty face.

A hundred paces off on the right bank of the pond, something dark
was standing motionless: was it a man or a tall post? Pyotr Mihalitch
thought of the divinity student who had been killed and thrown into
the pond.

"Olivier behaved inhumanly, but one way or another he did settle
the question, while I have settled nothing and have only made it
worse," he thought, gazing at the dark figure that looked like a
ghost. "He said and did what he thought right while I say and do
what I don't think right; and I don't know really what I do
think. . . ."

He rode up to the dark figure: it was an old rotten post, the relic
of some shed.

From Koltovitch's copse and garden there came a strong fragrant
scent of lilies of the valley and honey-laden flowers. Pyotr Mihalitch
rode along the bank of the pond and looked mournfully into the
water. And thinking about his life, he came to the conclusion he
had never said or acted upon what he really thought, and other
people had repaid him in the same way. And so the whole of life
seemed to him as dark as this water in which the night sky was
reflected and water-weeds grew in a tangle. And it seemed to him
that nothing could ever set it right.

AT HOME

I

THE Don railway. A quiet, cheerless station, white and solitary in
the steppe, with its walls baking in the sun, without a speck of
shade, and, it seems, without a human being. The train goes on after
leaving one here; the sound of it is scarcely audible and dies away
at last. Outside the station it is a desert, and there are no horses
but one's own. One gets into the carriage--which is so pleasant
after the train--and is borne along the road through the steppe,
and by degrees there a