Where are you going?" cried Startsev in horror, as she suddenly
got up and walked towards the house. "I must talk to you; I want
to explain myself. . . . Stay with me just five minutes, I supplicate
you!"

She stopped as though she wanted to say something, then awkwardly
thrust a note into his hand, ran home and sat down to the piano
again.

"Be in the cemetery," Startsev read, "at eleven o'clock to-night,
near the tomb of Demetti."

"Well, that's not at all clever," he thought, coming to himself.
"Why the cemetery? What for?"

It was clear: Kitten was playing a prank. Who would seriously dream
of making an appointment at night in the cemetery far out of the
town, when it might have been arranged in the street or in the town
gardens? And was it in keeping with him--a district doctor, an
intelligent, staid man--to be sighing, receiving notes, to hang
about cemeteries, to do silly things that even schoolboys think
ridiculous nowadays? What would this romance lead to? What would
his colleagues say when they heard of it? Such were Startsev's
reflections as he wandered round the tables at the club, and at
half-past ten he suddenly set off for the cemetery.

By now he had his own pair of horses, and a coachman called
Panteleimon, in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was
still warm, warm as it is in autumn. Dogs were howling in the suburb
near the slaughter-house. Startsev left his horses in one of the
side-streets at the end of the town, and walked on foot to the
cemetery.

"We all have our oddities," he thought. "Kitten is odd, too; and
--who knows?--perhaps she is not joking, perhaps she will come";
and he abandoned himself to this faint, vain hope, and it intoxicated
him.

He walked for half a mile through the fields; the cemetery showed
as a dark streak in the distance, like a forest or a big garden.
The wall of white stone came into sight, the gate. . . . In the
moonlight he could read on the gate: "The hour cometh." Startsev
went in at the little gate, and before anything else he saw the
white crosses and monuments on both sides of the broad avenue, and
the black shadows of them and the poplars; and for a long way round
it was all white and black, and the slumbering trees bowed their
branches over the white stones. It seemed as though it were lighter
here than in the fields; the maple-leaves stood out sharply like
paws on the yellow sand of the avenue and on the stones, and the
inscriptions on the