fore her. . . . He was clasping her knees,
gazing into her face and speaking passionately, hotly, eloquently.
In her terror and confusion she did not hear his words; for some
reason now, at this dangerous moment, while her knees were being
agreeably squeezed and felt as though they were in a warm bath, she
was trying, with a sort of angry spite, to interpret her own
sensations. She was angry that instead of brimming over with
protesting virtue, she was entirely overwhelmed with weakness,
apathy, and emptiness, like a drunken man utterly reckless; only
at the bottom of her soul a remote bit of herself was malignantly
taunting her: "Why don't you go? Is this as it should be? Yes?"

Seeking for some explanation, she could not understand how it was
she did not pull away the hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a
leech, and why, like Ilyin, she hastily glanced to right and to
left to see whether any one was looking. The clouds and the pines
stood motionless, looking at them severely, like old ushers seeing
mischief, but bribed not to tell the school authorities. The sentry
stood like a post on the embankment and seemed to be looking at the
seat.

"Let him look," thought Sofya Petrovna.

"But . . . but listen," she said at last, with despair in her voice.
"What can come of this? What will be the end of this?"

"I don't know, I don't know," he whispered, waving off the disagreeable
questions.

They heard the hoarse, discordant whistle of the train. This cold,
irrelevant sound from the everyday world of prose made Sofya Petrovna
rouse herself.

"I can't stay . . . it's time I was at home," she said, getting up
quickly. "The train is coming in. . . Andrey is coming by it! He
will want his dinner."

Sofya Petrovna turned towards the embankment with a burning face.
The engine slowly crawled by, then came the carriages. It was not
the local train, as she had supposed, but a goods train. The trucks
filed by against the background of the white church in a long string
like the days of a man's life, and it seemed as though it would
never end.

But at last the train passed, and the last carriage with the guard
and a light in it had disappeared behind the trees. Sofya Petrovna
turned round sharply, and without looking at Ilyin, walked rapidly
back along the track. She had regained her self-possession. Crimson
with shame, humiliated not by Ilyin--no, but by her own cowardice,
by the shamelessness with which she, a chaste and