went to her room, after
irresolutely holding out the ends of her fingers to Lavretsky.

The next day Lavretsky went to morning service. Liza was already in
the church when he entered. He remarked her, though she did not look
towards him. She prayed fervently; her eyes shone with a quiet light;
quietly she bowed and lifted her head.

He felt that she was praying for him also, and a strange emotion
filled his soul. The people standing gravely around, the familiar
faces, the harmonious chant, the odor of the incense, the long rays
slanting through the windows, the very sombreness of the walls and
arches--all appealed to his heart. It was long since he had been in
church--long since he had turned his thoughts to God. And even now he
did not utter any words of prayer--he did not even pray without words;
but nevertheless, for a moment, if not in body, at least in mind, he
bowed clown and bent himself humbly to the ground. He remembered how,
in the days of his childhood, he always used to pray in church till he
felt on his forehead something like a kind of light touch. "That" he
used then to think, "is my guardian angel visiting me and pressing
on me the seal of election." He looked at Liza. "It is you who have
brought me here," he thought. "Touch me--touch my soul!" Meanwhile,
she went on quietly praying. Her face seemed to him to be joyous,
and once more he felt softened, and he asked, for another's soul,
rest--for his own, pardon. They met outside in the porch, and she
received him with a friendly look of serious happiness. The
sun brightly lit up the fresh grass in the church-yard and the
many-colored dresses and kerchiefs of the women. The bells of the
neighboring churches sounded on high; the sparrows chirped on the
walls. Lavretsky stood by, smiling and bare-headed; a light breeze
played with his hair and Liza's, and with the ends of Liza's bonnet
strings. He seated Liza and her companion Lenochka, in the carriage,
gave away all the change he had about him to the beggars, and then
strolled slowly home.

XXX.

The days which followed were days of heaviness for Lavretsky. He felt
himself in a perpetual fever. Every morning he went to the post, and
impatiently tore open his letters and newspapers; but in none of them
did he find anything which could confirm or contradict that rumor, on
the truth of which he felt that so much now depended. At times he grew
disgusted with himself. "What am I," he then would thin