What's the good of your going on being
miserable with him? We must have it out! We will have it out with
him, and you will come to me. You are my wife, and not his. Let him
do what he likes. He'll get over his troubles somehow. . . . He is
not the first, and he won't be the last. . . . Will you run away?
Eh? Make haste and tell me! Will you run away?"

Liza got up and looked inquiringly at Groholsky.

"Run away?"

"Yes. . . . To my estate. . . . Then to the Crimea. . . . We will
tell him by letter. . . . We can go at night. There is a train at
half past one. Well? Is that all right?"

Liza scratched the bridge of her nose, and hesitated.

"Very well," she said, and burst into tears.

Patches of red came out of her cheeks, her eyes swelled, and tears
flowed down her kittenish face. . . .

"What is it?" cried Groholsky in a flutter. "Liza! what's the matter?
Come! what are you crying for? What a girl! Come, what is it?
Darling! Little woman!"

Liza held out her hands to Groholsky, and hung on his neck. There
was a sound of sobbing.

"I am sorry for him . . ." muttered Liza. "Oh, I am so sorry for
him!"

"Sorry for whom?"

"Va--Vanya. . . ."

"And do you suppose I'm not? But what's to be done? We are causing
him suffering. . . . He will be unhappy, will curse us . . . but
is it our fault that we love one another?"

As he uttered the last word, Groholsky darted away from Liza as
though he had been stung and sat down in an easy chair. Liza sprang
away from his neck and rapidly--in one instant--dropped on the
lounge.

They both turned fearfully red, dropped their eyes, and coughed.

A tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty, in the uniform of a government
clerk, had walked into the drawing-room. He had walked in unnoticed.
Only the bang of a chair which he knocked in the doorway had warned
the lovers of his presence, and made them look round. It was the
husband.

They had looked round too late.

He had seen Groholsky's arm round Liza's waist, and had seen Liza
hanging on Groholsky's white and aristocratic neck.

"He saw us!" Liza and Groholsky thought at the same moment, while
they did not know what to do with their heavy hands and embarrassed
eyes. . . .

The petrified husband, rosy-faced, turned white.

An agonising, strange, soul-revolting silence lasted for three
minutes. Oh, those three minutes! Groholsky remembers them to this
day.

The first to move and break the silence was the husband. He