`The train is at three?' queried the German. `I mustn't be late.'

Levin did not answer him, but walked out himself with his wife.

`Well, what have you to say to me?' he said to her in French.

He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look.

`I... I want to say that we can't go on like this; that this is misery...' she said.

`The servants are here at the buttery,' he said angrily; `don't make a scene.'

`Well, let's go in here!'

They were standing in the passage room. Kitty would have gone into the next room, but there the English governess was giving Tania a lesson.

`Well, come into the garden.'

In the garden they came upon a peasant weeding the path. And no longer considering that the peasant could see her tear-stained and his agitated face, that they looked like people fleeing from some disaster, they went on with rapid steps, feeling that they must speak out and clear up misunderstandings, must be alone together, and so get rid of the misery they were both feeling.

`We can't go on like this! It's misery! I am wretched; you are wretched. What for?' she said, when they had at last reached a solitary garden seat at a turn in the linden tree avenue.

`But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly, unclean, humiliatingly horrible?' he said, standing before her again in the same position, with his clenched fists on his chest, as he had stood before her that night.

`Yes,' she said in a shaking voice; `but, Kostia, surely you see I'm not to blame? All the morning I've been trying to take a tone... But such people... Why did he come? How happy we were!' she said, breathless with the sobs that shook her.

Although nothing had been pursuing them, and there was nothing to run away from, and they could not possibly have found anything very delightful on that garden seat, the gardener saw with astonishment that they passed him on their way home with comforted and radiant faces.


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