one
reason--that his name, too, was Vladimir. She sat up in bed and
called tenderly:

"Volodya!"

"What is it?" her husband responded.

"Nothing."

She lay down again. She heard a bell, perhaps the same nunnery bell.
Again she thought of the vestibule and the dark figures, and thoughts
of God and of inevitable death strayed through her mind, and she
covered her ears that she might not hear the bell. She thought that
before old age and death there would be a long, long life before
her, and that day by day she would have to put up with being close
to a man she did not love, who had just now come into the bedroom
and was getting into bed, and would have to stifle in her heart her
hopeless love for the other young, fascinating, and, as she thought,
exceptional man. She looked at her husband and tried to say good-night
to him, but suddenly burst out crying instead. She was vexed with
herself.

"Well, now then for the music!" said Yagitch.

She was not pacified till ten o'clock in the morning. She left off
crying and trembling all over, but she began to have a splitting
headache. Yagitch was in haste to go to the late mass, and in the
next room was grumbling at his orderly, who was helping him to
dress. He came into the bedroom once with the soft jingle of his
spurs to fetch something, and then a second time wearing his
epaulettes, and his orders on his breast, limping slightly from
rheumatism; and it struck Sofya Lvovna that he looked and walked
like a bird of prey.

She heard Yagitch ring the telephone bell.

"Be so good as to put me on to the Vassilevsky barracks," he said;
and a minute later: "Vassilevsky barracks? Please ask Doctor
Salimovitch to come to the telephone . . ." And a minute later:
"With whom am I speaking? Is it you, Volodya? Delighted. Ask your
father to come to us at once, dear boy; my wife is rather shattered
after yesterday. Not at home, you say? H'm! . . . Thank you. Very
good. I shall be much obliged . . . _Merci_."

Yagitch came into the bedroom for the third time, bent down to his
wife, made the sign of the cross over her, gave her his hand to
kiss (the women who had been in love with him used to kiss his hand
and he had got into the habit of it), and saying that he should be
back to dinner, went out.

At twelve o'clock the maid came in to announce that Vladimir
Mihalovitch had arrived. Sofya Lvovna, staggering with fatigue and
headache, hurriedly put on her marvellous new lilac dres