"Judging from the voice and the weeping I took it to be a little
girl of ten or twelve. She walked irresolutely into the summer-house,
sat down, and began half-praying, half-complaining aloud. . . .

"'Merciful God!' she said, crying, 'it's unbearable. It's beyond
all endurance! I suffer in silence, but I want to live too. . . .
Oh, my God! My God!'

"And so on in the same style.

"I wanted to look at the child and speak to her. So as not to
frighten her I first gave a loud sigh and coughed, then cautiously
struck a match. . . . There was a flash of bright light in the
darkness, which lighted up the weeping figure. It was Kisotchka!"

"Marvels upon marvels!" said Von Schtenberg with a sigh. "Black
night, the murmur of the sea; she in grief, he with a sensation of
world--solitude. . . . It's too much of a good thing. . . . You
only want Circassians with daggers to complete it."

"I am not telling you a tale, but fact."

"Well, even if it is a fact . . . it all proves nothing, and there
is nothing new in it. . . ."

"Wait a little before you find fault! Let me finish," said Ananyev,
waving his hand with vexation; "don't interfere, please! I am not
telling you, but the doctor. . . . Well," he went on, addressing
me and glancing askance at the student who bent over his books and
seemed very well satisfied at having gibed at the engineer--"well,
Kisotchka was not surprised or frightened at seeing me. It seemed
as though she had known beforehand that she would find me in the
summer-house. She was breathing in gasps and trembling all over as
though in a fever, while her tear-stained face, so far as I could
distinguish it as I struck match after match, was not the intelligent,
submissive weary face I had seen before, but something different,
which I cannot understand to this day. It did not express pain, nor
anxiety, nor misery--nothing of what was expressed by her words
and her tears. . . . I must own that, probably because I did not
understand it, it looked to me senseless and as though she were
drunk.

"'I can't bear it,' muttered Kisotchka in the voice of a crying
child. 'It's too much for me, Nikolay Anastasyitch. Forgive me,
Nikolav Anastasyitch. I can't go on living like this. . . . I am
going to the town to my mother's. . . . Take me there. . . . Take
me there, for God's sake!'

"In the presence of tears I can neither speak nor be silent. I was
flustered and muttered some nonsense trying to comfort her.