d, ill in body and in mind, he started forth without any object
in view, without any thought-out plan, merely in order to hide himself
somewhere, wherever it might be, and get some rest from the moral
tortures which had become insupportable to him.

"To fly, to fly!" he said in his deathbed delirium as he lay at
Astapova.

"Has papa considered that mama may not survive the separation from him?"
I asked my sister Sasha on October 29, when she was on the point of
going to join him at Shamerdino.

"Yes, he has considered all that, and still made up his mind to go,
because he thinks that nothing could be worse than the state that things
have come to here," she answered.

I confess that my explanation of my father's flight by no means exhausts
the question. Life is complex and every explanation of a man's conduct
is bound to suffer from one-sidedness. Besides, there are circumstances
of which I do not care to speak at the present moment, in order not to
cause unnecessary pain to people still living. It may be that if those
who were about my father during the last years of his life had known
what they were doing, things would have turned out differently.

The years will pass. The accumulated incrustations which hide the truth
will pass away. Much will be wiped out and forgotten. Among other things
my father's will will be forgotten--that will which he himself looked
upon as an "unnecessary outward means." And men will see more clearly
that legacy of love and truth in which he believed deeply, and which,
according to his own words, "cannot perish without a trace."

In conclusion I cannot refrain from quoting the opinion of one of my
kinsmen, who, after my father's death, read the diaries kept both by my
father and my mother during the autumn before Lyoff Nikolaievich left
Yasnaya Polyana.

"What a terrible misunderstanding!" he said. "Each loved the other with
such poignant affection, each was suffering all the time on the other's
behalf, and then this terrible ending!... I see the hand of fate in
this."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: The name we gave to the stone annex.]

[Footnote 2: The instinct for lime, necessary to feed their bones,
drives Russian children to nibble pieces of chalk or the whitewash off
the wall. In this case the boy was running to one of the grown-ups in
the house, and whom he called uncle, as Russian children call everybody
uncle or aunt, to get a piece of the chalk that he had for writin