, and the impressions won during
them were always beautiful and sublime.

They expected her husband to come. But he sent a letter in which he said
that his eyes were bad and implored his wife to come home. Anna
Sergueyevna began to worry.

"It is a good thing I am going away," she would say to Gomov. "It is
fate."

She went in a carriage and he accompanied her. They drove for a whole
day. When she took her seat in the car of an express-train and when the
second bell sounded, she said:

"Let me have another look at you.... Just one more look. Just as you
are."

She did not cry, but was sad and low-spirited, and her lips trembled.

"I will think of you--often," she said. "Good-bye. Good-bye. Don't think
ill of me. We part for ever. We must, because we ought not to have met
at all. Now, good-bye."

The train moved off rapidly. Its lights disappeared, and in a minute or
two the sound of it was lost, as though everything were agreed to put an
end to this sweet, oblivious madness. Left alone on the platform,
looking into the darkness, Gomov heard the trilling of the grasshoppers
and the humming of the telegraph-wires, and felt as though he had just
woke up. And he thought that it had been one more adventure, one more
affair, and it also was finished and had left only a memory. He was
moved, sad, and filled with a faint remorse; surely the young woman,
whom he would never see again, had not been happy with him; he had been
kind to her, friendly, and sincere, but still in his attitude toward
her, in his tone and caresses, there had always been a thin shadow of
raillery, the rather rough arrogance of the successful male aggravated
by the fact that he was twice as old as she. And all the time she had
called him kind, remarkable, noble, so that he was never really himself
to her, and had involuntarily deceived her....

Here at the station, the smell of autumn was in the air, and the evening
was cool.

"It is time for me to go North," thought Gomov, as he left the platform.
"It is time."

III

At home in Moscow, it was already like winter; the stoves were heated,
and in the mornings, when the children were getting ready to go to
school, and had their tea, it was dark and their nurse lighted the lamp
for a short while. The frost had already begun. When the first snow
falls, the first day of driving in sledges, it is good to see the white
earth, the white roofs; one breathes easily, eagerly, and then one
remembers t