er and bitterness that
had been accumulating in him for the last seven days fastened upon
Vlassitch.

"One has seduced and abducted my sister," he thought, "another will
come and murder my mother, a third will set fire to the house and
sack the place. . . . And all this under the mask of friendship,
lofty ideas, unhappiness!"

"No, it shall not be!" Pyotr Mihalitch cried suddenly, and he brought
his fist down on the table.

He jumped up and ran out of the dining-room. In the stable the
steward's horse was standing ready saddled. He got on it and galloped
off to Vlassitch.

There was a perfect tempest within him. He felt a longing to do
something extraordinary, startling, even if he had to repent of it
all his life afterwards. Should he call Vlassitch a blackguard,
slap him in the face, and then challenge him to a duel? But Vlassitch
was not one of those men who do fight duels; being called a blackguard
and slapped in the face would only make him more unhappy, and would
make him shrink into himself more than ever. These unhappy, defenceless
people are the most insufferable, the most tiresome creatures in
the world. They can do anything with impunity. When the luckless
man responds to well-deserved reproach by looking at you with eyes
full of deep and guilty feeling, and with a sickly smile bends his
head submissively, even justice itself could not lift its hand
against him.

"No matter. I'll horsewhip him before her eyes and tell him what I
think of him," Pyotr Mihalitch decided.

He was riding through his wood and waste land, and he imagined Zina
would try to justify her conduct by talking about the rights of
women and individual freedom, and about there being no difference
between legal marriage and free union. Like a woman, she would argue
about what she did not understand. And very likely at the end she
would ask, "How do you come in? What right have you to interfere?"

"No, I have no right," muttered Pyotr Mihalitch. "But so much the
better. . . . The harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere,
the better."

It was sultry. Clouds of gnats hung over the ground and in the waste
places the peewits called plaintively. Everything betokened rain,
but he could not see a cloud in the sky. Pyotr Mihalitch crossed
the boundary of his estate and galloped over a smooth, level field.
He often went along this road and knew every bush, every hollow in
it. What now in the far distance looked in the dusk like a dar