r them; they could only meet in secret,
hiding themselves from people, like thieves! Was not their life
shattered?

"Come, do stop!" he said.

It was evident to him that this love of theirs would not soon be
over, that he could not see the end of it. Anna Sergeyevna grew
more and more attached to him. She adored him, and it was unthinkable
to say to her that it was bound to have an end some day; besides,
she would not have believed it!

He went up to her and took her by the shoulders to say something
affectionate and cheering, and at that moment he saw himself in the
looking-glass.

His hair was already beginning to turn grey. And it seemed strange
to him that he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the
last few years. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm
and quivering. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and
lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and
wither like his own. Why did she love him so much? He always seemed
to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not
himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had
been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they
noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same. And not one of
them had been happy with him. Time passed, he had made their
acquaintance, got on with them, parted, but he had never once loved;
it was anything you like, but not love.

And only now when his head was grey he had fallen properly, really
in love--for the first time in his life.

Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and
akin, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them
that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not
understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though
they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in
different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed
of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt
that this love of theirs had changed them both.

In moments of depression in the past he had comforted himself with
any arguments that came into his mind, but now he no longer cared
for arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere
and tender. . . .

"Don't cry, my darling," he said. "You've had your cry; that's
enough. . . . Let us talk now, let us think of some plan."

Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, ta