umbled by her bedside; my shoulder jostled against her shoulder, and
meanwhile I was thinking how we used to give our children their bath
together.

"Help her! help her!" my wife implored me. "Do something!"

What could I do? I could do nothing. There was some load on the girl's
heart; but I did not understand, I knew nothing about it, and could only
mutter:

"It's nothing, it's nothing; it will pass. Sleep, sleep!"

To make things worse, there was a sudden sound of dogs howling, at first
subdued and uncertain, then loud, two dogs howling together. I had
never attached significance to such omens as the howling of dogs or the
shrieking of owls, but on that occasion it sent a pang to my heart, and
I hastened to explain the howl to myself.

"It's nonsense," I thought, "the influence of one organism on another.
The intensely strained condition of my nerves has infected my wife,
Liza, the dog--that is all.... Such infection explains presentiments,
forebodings...."

When a little later I went back to my room to write a prescription for
Liza, I no longer thought I should die at once, but only had such a
weight, such a feeling of oppression in my soul that I felt actually
sorry that I had not died on the spot. For a long time I stood
motionless in the middle of the room, pondering what to prescribe for
Liza. But the moans overhead ceased, and I decided to prescribe nothing,
and yet I went on standing there....

There was a deathlike stillness, such a stillness, as some author has
expressed it, "it rang in one's ears." Time passed slowly; the streaks
of moonlight on the window-sill did not shift their position, but seemed
as though frozen.... It was still some time before dawn.

But the gate in the fence creaked, some one stole in and, breaking a
twig from one of those scraggy trees, cautiously tapped on the window
with it.

"Nikolay Stepanovitch," I heard a whisper. "Nikolay Stepanovitch."

I opened the window, and fancied I was dreaming: under the window,
huddled against the wall, stood a woman in a black dress, with the
moonlight bright upon her, looking at me with great eyes. Her face was
pale, stern, and weird-looking in the moonlight, like marble, her chin
was quivering.

"It is I," she said--"I... Katya."

In the moonlight all women's eyes look big and black, all people look
taller and paler, and that was probably why I had not recognized her for
the first minute.

"What is it?"

"Forgive me!" she said.