ent. Of course she, Marie Ivanovna, had
wrought this change in him. There was no doubt this morning that she
loved him. She had in her face and bearing all the pride and also all
the humility that a love, won, secured, ensured, brings with it. She
did not look at him often nor take his hand. She spoke to me during
the drive and only once and again smiled up at him; but her soul,
shining through the thin covering of her body, laughed to me, crying:
"I am happy because I have my desire. Of yesterday I remember nothing,
of to-morrow I can know nothing, but to-day is mine!"

He was very quiet. When he looked at her his eyes took complete
possession of her. I did not, that morning, count at all to either of
them, but I too felt a kind of pride as though I were sharing in some
triumphal procession. She chattered on, and then at last was silent. I
remember that the great heat of the morning wrought in us all a kind
of lethargy. We were lazily confident that day that nothing evil could
overtake us. We idly watched the sky, the river, the approaching
forest, with a luxurious reliance on the power of man, and I caught
much of my assurance from Semyonov himself. He did really seem to me,
that morning, a "tremendous" figure, as he sat there, so still, so
triumphant. He had never before, perhaps, been quite certain of Marie
Ivanovna, had been alarmed at her independence, or at his own
passionate love for her. But this morning he _knew_. She loved him.
She was his--no one could take her from him. She was the woman he
wanted as he had never wanted a woman before, and _she was his--she
was his_!

I do not remember our entering the forest. I know that first you climb
a rough, rather narrow road up from the river, that the trees close
about you very gradually, that there is a little church with a green
turret and a fine view of the Nestor, and that there a broad solemn
avenue of silver birch leads you forward, gently and without any
sinister omens. Then again the forest clears and there are fields of
corn and, built amongst the thin scattering of trees, the village of
N----. It was here, on passing the first houses of the village, that I
felt the heat to be almost unbearable; it seemed strange to me, I
remember, that they (whoever "they" were), having so many trees here,
a forest that stretched many miles behind them, should have chosen to
pitch their village upon the only exposed and torrid bit of ground
that they could find. Behind u