d easy
judgments ... I failed, of course. What could I do all at once? One is
as God has pleased from the beginning. Ah! how I was unhappy those
five years! I wished that he would die and then cursed myself for
wishing it. And yet I knew that I had something that he had not. I
needed her more than he, and she knew that. Her charm for him would
fade perhaps as the years passed. He was a passionate man who had
loved many women. For me, as she well knew, it would never pass.

"She died. For a time I was like a dead man. And she was not enough
with me. I talked to her friends, but they had not known her--not as
she was. Only one had known her and he was the friend whom she had
loved.

"Of course he found me as he had always done--tiresome, irritating, of
vulgar taste. But he, too, wanted to speak of her. And so we were
drawn together.... Now ... is he my friend? I say always that he is. I
say to myself: 'Andrey Vassilievitch, he is your best friend'--but I
am jealous. Yes, Ivan Andreievitch, I am jealous of him. I think that
perhaps he will die before me and that then--somewhere--together--they
will laugh at me. And he has _such_ memories of her! At the last she
cried his name! He is so much a grander man than I! Fine in every way!
Did I say that she would laugh? No, no ... that never. But she will
say: 'Poor Andrey Vassilievitch!' She will pity me!... I think that I
would be happier if I did not see my friend. But I cannot leave
him.... We talk of her often. And yet he despises me and wonders that
she can have loved me...."

I had a fear lest Andrey Vassilievitch should cry. He seemed so
desolate there, giving strange little self-important coughs and
sniffs, beating the ground with his smart little military boot.

Across the river the black wall of cloud had returned and now hung
above the forest of S----, that lay sullenly, in its shadow,
forbidding and thick, itself like a cloud. The world was cold, the
Nestor like a snake.... I shivered, seized by some sudden sense of
coming disaster and trouble. The evenings there were often strangely
chill.

"Look," cried Andrey Vassilievitch, starting to his feet "There's
Marie Ivanovna!"

I turned and saw her standing there, smiling at us, silently and
without movement, like an apparition.

CHAPTER II

MARIE IVANOVNA

It was on July 23 that I first entered the Forest of S----. I did not,
I remember, pay the event any especial attention. I went with Anna
Petrovn