d, that
morning all comparisons seemed to take on a tinge of melancholy; the
reason being that throughout the previous evening there had been
moaning in my soul a mournful dirge on the future life.

With nothing, however, were the churches of the town of which I am
speaking exactly comparable, for many of them had attained a degree of
beauty the contemplation of which caused the town to assume
throughout--a different, a more pleasing and seductive, aspect. Thought
I to myself: "Would that men had fashioned all other buildings in the
town as the churches have been fashioned!"

One of the latter, an old, squat edifice the blank windows of which
were deeply sunken in the stuccoed walls, was known as the "Prince's
Church," for the reason that it enshrined the remains of a local Prince
and his wife, persons of whom it stood recorded that "they did pass all
their lives in kindly, unchanging love."...

The following night Gubin and I chanced to see Peter Birkin's tall,
pale, timid young wife traverse the garden on her way to a tryst in the
washhouse with her lover, the precentor of the Prince's Church. And as
clad in a simple gown, and barefooted, and having her ample shoulders
swathed in an old, gold jacket or shawl of some sort, she crossed the
orchard by a path running between two lines of apple trees; she walked
with the unhasting gait of a cat which is crossing a yard after a
shower of rain, and from time to time, whenever a puddle is
encountered, lifts and shakes fastidiously one of its soft paws.
Probably, in the woman's case, this came of the fact that things kept
pricking and tickling her soles as she proceeded. Also, her knees, I
could see, were trembling, and her step had in it a certain hesitancy,
a certain lack of assurance.

Meanwhile, bending over the garden from the warm night sky, the moon's
kindly visage, though on the wane, was shining brightly; and when the
woman emerged from the shadow of the trees I could discern the dark
patches of her eyes, her rounded, half-parted lips, and the thick plait
of hair which lay across her bosom. Also, in the moonlight her bodice
had assumed a bluish tinge, so that she looked almost phantasmal; and
when soundlessly, moving as though on air, she stepped back into the
shadow of the trees, that shadow seemed to lighten.

All this happened at midnight, or thereabouts, but neither of us was
yet asleep, owing to the fact that Gubin had been telling me some
interesting stori