How you have frightened me!" she said, breathing hard, still pale
and overwhelmed. "Oh, how you have frightened me! I am half dead.
Why have you come? Why?"

"But do understand, Anna, do understand . . ." he said hastily in
a low voice. "I entreat you to understand. . . ."

She looked at him with dread, with entreaty, with love; she looked
at him intently, to keep his features more distinctly in her memory.

"I am so unhappy," she went on, not heeding him. "I have thought
of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you.
And I wanted to forget, to forget you; but why, oh, why, have you
come?"

On the landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking
down, but that was nothing to Gurov; he drew Anna Sergeyevna to
him, and began kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.

"What are you doing, what are you doing!" she cried in horror,
pushing him away. "We are mad. Go away to-day; go away at once. . . .
I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you. . . . There
are people coming this way!"

Some one was coming up the stairs.

"You must go away," Anna Sergeyevna went on in a whisper. "Do you
hear, Dmitri Dmitritch? I will come and see you in Moscow. I have
never been happy; I am miserable now, and I never, never shall be
happy, never! Don't make me suffer still more! I swear I'll come
to Moscow. But now let us part. My precious, good, dear one, we
must part!"

She pressed his hand and began rapidly going downstairs, looking
round at him, and from her eyes he could see that she really was
unhappy. Gurov stood for a little while, listened, then, when all
sound had died away, he found his coat and left the theatre.

IV

And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Once in two
or three months she left S----, telling her husband that she was
going to consult a doctor about an internal complaint--and her
husband believed her, and did not believe her. In Moscow she stayed
at the Slaviansky Bazaar hotel, and at once sent a man in a red cap
to Gurov. Gurov went to see her, and no one in Moscow knew of it.

Once he was going to see her in this way on a winter morning (the
messenger had come the evening before when he was out). With him
walked his daughter, whom he wanted to take to school: it was on
the way. Snow was falling in big wet flakes.

"It's three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing,"
said Gurov to his daughter. "The thaw is only on the surface of th