that she certainly was going, which she had not really believed
when she was saying good-bye to Granny, and when she was looking
at her mother. Good-bye, town! And she suddenly thought of it all:
Andrey, and his father and the new house and the naked lady with
the vase; and it all no longer frightened her, nor weighed upon
her, but was naïve and trivial and continually retreated further
away. And when they got into the railway carriage and the train
began to move, all that past which had been so big and serious
shrank up into something tiny, and a vast wide future which till
then had scarcely been noticed began unfolding before her. The rain
pattered on the carriage windows, nothing could be seen but the
green fields, telegraph posts with birds sitting on the wires flitted
by, and joy made her hold her breath; she thought that she was going
to freedom, going to study, and this was just like what used, ages
ago, to be called going off to be a free Cossack.

She laughed and cried and prayed all at once.

"It's a-all right," said Sasha, smiling. "It's a-all right."

VI

Autumn had passed and winter, too, had gone. Nadya had begun to be
very homesick and thought every day of her mother and her grandmother;
she thought of Sasha too. The letters that came from home were kind
and gentle, and it seemed as though everything by now were forgiven
and forgotten. In May after the examinations she set off for home
in good health and high spirits, and stopped on the way at Moscow
to see Sasha. He was just the same as the year before, with the
same beard and unkempt hair, with the same large beautiful eyes,