myonov was no easy companion at any time and we had the
very natural desire to throw off from us the weight of Marie
Ivanovna's unexpected death. I will not speak of myself in this
matter, but for the others. She had not been very long in their
company, she had been strange and unsettled in her behaviour, she had
been engaged to a man, jilted him, and engaged herself to another--all
within a very short period of time. I, myself, was occupied
incessantly by my thoughts of her, but that was my own affair. The
past week then with us had been tranquil and easy. On my arrival at
the "Point" in the Forest I was met at once by a new atmosphere. For
one thing the war here was on the very top of us. Only a few yards
away, towards the end of the garden, they were digging trenches.
Somewhere beyond the windows, in the Forest, a battery had established
itself near a clearing at the edge of a hill, the guns disguised with
leaves and branches. Soldiers were moving incessantly to and fro. The
house seemed full of wounded, wagons coming and going. They were
digging graves in the garden, and sheeted bodies were lying in the
orchard.

My friends greeted me, seemed glad to see me for a moment, and then
pursued their business. I was entirely outside their life. Only ten
days before I had felt a closer intimacy with Trenchard, Andrey
Vassilievitch and Nikitin than I had ever had with any of them. Now I
simply did not exist for them. It was not the work that excluded me.
The evening that passed then was an easy evening--very little to do.
We spent most of the night in playing _chemin-de-fer_. No, it was not
the work. It was quite simply that something was happening to all of
them in which I had no concern. They were all changed and about them
all--yes, even, I believe, about Semyonov--there was an air of
suppressed excitement, rather the excitement that schoolboys have,
when they have prepared some secret forbidden defiance or adventure.
Trenchard, whom I had left in the depths of a lethargic depression,
was most curiously preoccupied. He looked at me first as though he did
not perfectly remember me. He, assuredly, was not well. His eyes were
lined heavily, his white cheeks had a flush of red that burnt there
feverishly, and he seemed extraordinarily thin. He was restless, his
eyes were never still, and I saw him sometimes fix them, in a strange
way, upon some object as though he would assure himself that it was
there. He was obviously unde