our intentions about it all?" I inquired, to divert
him from such a disagreeable recollection. "That is to say, how do you
imagine it is going to turn out? Do you ever speak to her about the
future, or about how your love or friendship are going to end?"

"Do you mean, do I intend to marry her eventually?" he inquired, in his
turn, with a renewed blush, but turning himself round and looking me
boldly in the face.

"Yes, certainly," I replied as I settled myself down. "We are both of us
grown-up, as well as friends, so we may as well discuss our future life
as we drive along. No one could very well overlook or overhear us now."

"Why should I NOT marry her?" he went on in response to my reassuring
reply. "It is my aim--as it should be the aim of every honourable
man--to be as good and as happy as possible; and with her, if she
should still be willing when I have become more independent, I should be
happier and better than with the greatest beauty in the world."

Absorbed in such conversation, we hardly noticed that we were
approaching Kuntsevo, or that the sky was becoming overcast and
beginning to threaten rain. On the right, the sun was slowly sinking
behind the ancient trees of the Kuntsevo park--one half of its brilliant
disc obscured with grey, subluminous cloud, and the other half sending
forth spokes of flaming light which threw the old trees into striking
relief as they stood there with their dense crowns of green showing
against a blue patch of sky. The light and shimmer of that patch
contrasted sharply with the heavy pink cloud which lay massed above
a young birch-tree visible on the horizon before us, while, a little
further to the right, the parti-coloured roofs of the Kuntsevo mansion
could be seen projecting above a belt of trees and undergrowth--one side
of them reflecting the glittering rays of the sun, and the other side
harmonising with the more louring portion of the heavens. Below us, and
to the left, showed the still blue of a pond where it lay surrounded
with pale-green laburnums--its dull, concave-looking depths repeating
the trees in more sombre shades of colour over the surface of a hillock.
Beyond the water spread the black expanse of a ploughed field, with the
straight line of a dark-green ridge by which it was bisected running far
into the distance, and there joining the leaden, threatening horizon.

On either side of the soft road along which the phaeton was pursuing the
even tenour of it