sides and tiny bushes which grew in the ditches and caught the
straying wisps of mist. Half a mile from the gate they saw the dark
patch of Kuznetsov's wood.

"Why has she come with me? I shall have to see her back," thought
Ognev, but looking at her profile he gave a friendly smile and said:
"One doesn't want to go away in such lovely weather. It's quite a
romantic evening, with the moon, the stillness, and all the etceteras.
Do you know, Vera Gavrilovna, here I have lived twenty-nine years
in the world and never had a romance. No romantic episode in my
whole life, so that I only know by hearsay of rendezvous, 'avenues
of sighs,' and kisses. It's not normal! In town, when one sits in
one's lodgings, one does not notice the blank, but here in the fresh
air one feels it. . . . One resents it!"

"Why is it?"

"I don't know. I suppose I've never had time, or perhaps it was I
have never met women who. . . . In fact, I have very few acquaintances
and never go anywhere."

For some three hundred paces the young people walked on in silence.
Ognev kept glancing at Verotchka's bare head and shawl, and days
of spring and summer rose to his mind one after another. It had
been a period when far from his grey Petersburg lodgings, enjoying
the friendly warmth of kind people, nature, and the work he loved,
he had not had time to notice how the sunsets followed the glow of
dawn, and how, one after another foretelling the end of summer,
first the nightingale ceased singing, then the quail, then a little
later the landrail. The days slipped by unnoticed, so that life