house, and climbed the precipice, with the picture of her vividly before
his mind's eye.

In Malinovka and the neighbourhood there were tragic memories connected
with this precipice. In the lifetime of Boris's parents a man wild with
jealousy, a tailor from the town, had killed his wife and her lover
there in the midst of the thicket, and had then cut his own throat. The
suicide had been buried on the spot where he had committed the crime.
Among the common people, as always happens in cases of this sort, there
were rumours that the murderer, all dressed in white, wandered about the
wood, climbed the precipice, and looked down on town and village before
he vanished into air. And for superstitious reasons this part of the
grounds had been left neglected. None of the servants went down the
precipice, and the peasants from the outskirts of the town and from
Malinovka made a detour to avoid it. The fence that divided the Raiskys'
park from the woods had long since fallen into disrepair. Pines and
bushes of hawthorn and dwarf-cherry had woven themselves together into a
dense growth in the midst of which was concealed a neglected arbour.

Boris vividly imagined the scene, how the jealous husband, trembling
with agitation, stole through the bushes, threw himself on his rival,
and struck him with his knife; how the woman flung herself at his feet
and begged his forgiveness. But he, with the foam of madness on his lips,
struck her again and again, and then, in the presence of the two corpses,
cut his own throat. Boris shuddered. Agitated and gloomy he turned from
the accursed spot. Yet he was attracted by the mysterious darkness of
the tangled wood to the precipice, to the lovely view over the Volga and
its banks.

He closed his eyes, abandoning himself to the contemplation of the