She added after a short silence:
"To the crow somewhere God sent a pi-ece of cheese. Have you got that?"

I went out into the hall, and, without a thought in my head, stood and
looked out at the pond and the village, and still I heard:

"A piece of cheese.... To the crow somewhere God sent a piece of
cheese."

And I left the house by the way I had come the first time, only
reversing the order, from the yard into the garden, past the house, then
along the lime-walk. Here a boy overtook me and handed me a note: "I
have told my sister everything and she insists on my parting from you,"
I read. "I could not hurt her by disobeying. God will give you
happiness. If you knew how bitterly mamma and I have cried."

Then through the fir avenue and the rotten fence. ...Over the fields
where the corn was ripening and the quails screamed, cows and shackled
horses now were browsing. Here and there on the hills the winter corn
was already showing green. A sober, workaday mood possessed me and I was
ashamed of all I had said at the Volchaninovs', and once more it became
tedious to go on living. I went home, packed my things, and left that
evening for Petersburg.

* * *

I never saw the Volchaninovs again. Lately on my way to the Crimea I met
Bielokurov at a station. As of old he was in a _poddiovka_, wearing an
embroidered shirt, and when I asked after his health, he replied:
"Quite well, thanks be to God." He began to talk. He had sold his estate
and bought another, smaller one in the name of Lyabov Ivanovna. He told
me a little about the Volchaninovs. Lyda, he said, still lived at
Sholkovka and taught the children in the school; little by little she
succeeded in gathering round herself a circle of sympathetic people, who
formed a strong party, and at the last Zemstvo election they drove out
Balaguin, who up till then had had the whole district in his hands. Of
Genya Bielokurov said that she did not live at home and he did not know
where she was.

I have already begun to forget about the house with the mezzanine, and
only now and then, when I am working or reading, suddenly--without rhyme
or reason--I remember the green light in the window, and the sound of my
own footsteps as I walked through the fields that night, when I was in
love, rubbing my hands to keep them warm. And even more rarely, when I
am sad and lonely, I begin already to recollect and it seems to me that
I, too, am being remembered and waited for, and that we s