ft and reached the
gates of the cemetery. There Kisotchka stopped and said:

"'I am going back, Nikolay Anastasyitch! You go home, and God bless
you, but I am going back. I am not frightened.'

"'Well, what next!' I said, disconcerted. 'If you are going, you
had better go!'

"'I have been too hasty. . . . It was all about nothing that
mattered. You and your talk took me back to the past and put all
sort of ideas into my head. . . . I was sad and wanted to cry, and
my husband said rude things to me before that officer, and I could
not bear it. . . . And what's the good of my going to the town to
my mother's? Will that make me any happier? I must go back. . . .
But never mind . . . let us go on,' said Kisotchka, and she laughed.
'It makes no difference!'

"I remembered that over the gate of the cemetery there was an
inscription: 'The hour will come wherein all they that lie in the
grave will hear the voice of the Son of God.' I knew very well that
sooner of later I and Kisotchka and her husband and the officer in
the white tunic would lie under the dark trees in the churchyard;
I knew that an unhappy and insulted fellow-creature was walking
beside me. All this I recognised distinctly, but at the same time
I was troubled by an oppressive and unpleasant dread that Kisotchka
would turn back, and that I should not manage to say to her what
had to be said. Never at any other time in my life have thoughts
of a higher order been so closely interwoven with the basest animal
prose as on that night. . . . It was horrible!

"Not far from the cemetery we found a cab. When we reached the High
Street, where Kisotchka's mother lived, we dismissed the cab and
walked along the pavement. Kisotchka was silent all the while, while
I looked at her, and I raged at myself, 'Why don't you begin? Now's
the time!' About twenty paces from the hotel where I was staying,
Kisotchka stopped by the lamp-post and burst into tears.

"'Nikolay Anastasyitch!' she said, crying and laughing and looking
at me with wet shining eyes, 'I shall never forget your sympathy
. . . . How good you are! All of you are so splendid--all of you!
Honest, great-hearted, kind, clever. . . . Ah, how good that is!'

"She saw in me a highly educated man, advanced in every sense of
the word, and on her tear-stained laughing face, together with the
emotion and enthusiasm aroused by my personality, there was clearly
written regret that she so rarely saw such people, and tha