blood relations; and he felt that the nerves of this weeping, shaking
girl responded to his half-sick, overstrained nerves like iron to
a magnet. He never could have loved a healthy, strong, rosy-cheeked
woman, but pale, weak, unhappy Tanya attracted him.

And he liked stroking her hair and her shoulders, pressing her hand
and wiping away her tears. . . . At last she left off crying. She
went on for a long time complaining of her father and her hard,
insufferable life in that house, entreating Kovrin to put himself
in her place; then she began, little by little, smiling, and sighing
that God had given her such a bad temper. At last, laughing aloud,
she called herself a fool, and ran out of the room.

When a little later Kovrin went into the garden, Yegor Semyonitch
and Tanya were walking side by side along an avenue as though nothing
had happened, and both were eating rye bread with salt on it, as
both were hungry.

V

Glad that he had been so successful in the part of peacemaker,
Kovrin went into the park. Sitting on a garden seat, thinking, he
heard the rattle of a carriage and a feminine laugh--visitors
were arriving. When the shades of evening began falling on the
garden, the sounds of the violin and singing voices reached him
indistinctly, and that reminded him of the black monk. Where, in
what land or in what planet, was that optical absurdity moving now?

Hardly had he recalled the legend and pictured in his imagination
the dark apparition he had seen in the rye-field, when, from behind