and
straw. Behind the wattled hedges the fruit-trees were reddening and all
around the trees were red or golden. In the church-tower the bells were
ringing, the children were carrying ikons to the school and singing the
Litany of the Virgin. And how clear the air was, and how high the doves
soared!

The Te Deum was sung in the schoolroom. Then the Kurilovka peasants
presented Masha with an ikon, and the Dubechnia peasants gave her a
large cracknel and a gilt salt-cellar. And Masha began to weep.

"And if we have said anything out of the way or have been discontented,
please forgive us," said an old peasant, bowing to us both.

As we drove home Masha looked back at the school. The green roof which I
had painted glistened in the sun, and we could see it for a long time.
And I felt that Masha's glances were glances of farewell.

XVI

In the evening she got ready to go to town.

She had often been to town lately to stay the night. In her absence I
could not work, and felt listless and disheartened; our big yard seemed
dreary, disgusting, and deserted; there were ominous noises in the
garden, and without her the house, the trees, the horses were no longer
"ours."

I never went out but sat all the time at her writing-table among her
books on farming and agriculture, those deposed favourites, wanted no
more, which looked out at me so shamefacedly from the bookcase. For
hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, and the autumn night
crept up as black as soot to the windows, I sat brooding over an old
glove of hers, or the pen she always used, and her little scissors. I
did nothing and saw clearly that everything I had done before,
ploughing, sowing, and felling trees, had only been because she wanted
it. And if she told me to clean out a well, when I had to stand
waist-deep in water, I would go and do it, without trying to find out
whether the well wanted cleaning or not. And now, when she was away,
Dubechnia with its squalor, its litter, its slamming shutters, with
thieves prowling about it day and night, seemed to me like a chaos in
which work was entirely useless. And why should I work, then? Why
trouble and worry about the future, when I felt that the ground was
slipping away from under me, that my position at Dubechnia was hollow,
that, in a word, the same fate awaited me as had befallen the books on
agriculture? Oh! what anguish it was at night, in the lonely hours, when
I lay listening uneasily, as t