intelligent, staid man--to be sighing, receiving notes, to hang
about cemeteries, to do silly things that even schoolboys think
ridiculous nowadays? What would this romance lead to? What would
his colleagues say when they heard of it? Such were Startsev's
reflections as he wandered round the tables at the club, and at
half-past ten he suddenly set off for the cemetery.

By now he had his own pair of horses, and a coachman called
Panteleimon, in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was
still warm, warm as it is in autumn. Dogs were howling in the suburb
near the slaughter-house. Startsev left his horses in one of the
side-streets at the end of the town, and walked on foot to the
cemetery.

"We all have our oddities," he thought. "Kitten is odd, too; and
--who knows?--perhaps she is not joking, perhaps she will come";
and he abandoned himself to this faint, vain hope, and it intoxicated
him.

He walked for half a mile through the fields; the cemetery showed
as a dark streak in the distance, like a forest or a big garden.
The wall of white stone came into sight, the gate. . . . In the
moonlight he could read on the gate: "The hour cometh." Startsev
went in at the little gate, and before anything else he saw the
white crosses and monuments on both sides of the broad avenue, and
the black shadows of them and the poplars; and for a long way round
it was all white and black, and the slumbering trees bowed their
branches over the white stones. It seemed as though it were lighter
here than in the fields; the maple-leaves stood out sharply like
paws on the yellow sand of the avenue and on the stones, and the