heard from your lips,... but why remind you of
what you said then? and now I am going away to-day. I am going away
disgraced, after a cruel explanation with you, carrying with me no
hope.... And you do not know yet to what a degree I am to blame as
regards you... I have such a foolish lack of reserve, such a weak habit
of confiding. But why speak of this? I am leaving you for ever!'

(Here Rudin had related to Natalya his visit to Volintsev, but on second
thoughts he erased all that part, and added the second postscript to his
letter to Volintsev.)

'I remain alone upon earth to devote myself, as you said to me this
morning with bitter irony, to other interests more congenial to me.
Alas! if I could really devote myself to these interests, if I could
at last conquer my inertia.... But no! I shall remain to the end the
incomplete creature I have always been.... The first obstacle, ... and
I collapse entirely; what has passed with you has shown me that If I had
but sacrificed my love to my future work, to my vocation; but I simply
was afraid of the responsibility that had fallen upon me, and therefore
I am, truly, unworthy of you. I do not deserve that you should be torn
out of your sphere for me.... And indeed all this, perhaps, is for the
best. I shall perhaps be the stronger and the purer for this experience.

'I wish you all happiness. Farewell! Think sometimes of me. I hope that
you may still hear of me.

'RUDIN.'

Natalya let Rudin's letter drop on to her lap, and sat a long time
motionless, her eyes fixed on the ground. This letter proved to her
clearer than all possible arguments that she had been right, when in the
morning, at her parting with Rudin, she had involuntarily cried out that
he did not love her! But that made things no easier for her. She sat
perfectly still; it seemed as though waves of darkness without a ray of
light had closed over her head, and she had gone down cold and dumb to
the depths. The first disillusionment is painful for every one; but for
a sincere heart, averse to self-deception and innocent of frivolity
or exaggeration, it is almost unendurable. Natalya remembered her
childhood, how, when walking in the evening, she always tried to go in
the direction of the setting sun, where there was light in the sky, and
not toward the darkened half of the heavens. Life now stood in darkness
before her, and she had turned her back on the light for ever....

Tears started into Natalya's ey