The freshness of the air called a slight moisture into Lavretsky’s eyes, passed caressingly over all his limbs, and flowed with free current into his chest.  He was conscious of enjoying, and felt glad of that enjoyment.  “Well, we will live on still; she has not entirely deprived us—­” he did not say who, or of what.—­Then he began to think about Liza; that she could scarcely be in love with Panshine; that if he had met her under other circumstances—­God knows what might have come of it; that he understood Lemm’s feelings about her now, although she had “no words of her own.”  And, moreover, that that was not true; for she had words of her own.  “Do not speak lightly about that,” recurred to Lavretsky’s memory.  For a long time he rode on with bent head, then he slowly drew himself up repeating,—­

  “And I have burnt all that I used to worship,
  I worship all that I used to burn—­”

then he suddenly struck his horse with his whip and and galloped straight away home.

On alighting from his horse he gave a final look round, a thankful smile playing involuntarily on his lips.  Night—­silent, caressing night—­lay on the hills and dales.  From its fragrant depths afar—­whether from heaven or from earth could not be told—­there poured a soft and quiet warmth.  Lavretsky wished a last farewell to Liza—­and hastened up the steps.

The next day went by rather slowly, rain setting in early in the morning.  Lemm looked askance, and compressed his lips even tighter and tighter, as if he had made a vow never to open them again.  When Lavretsky lay down at night he took to bed with him a whole bundle of French newspapers, which had already lain unopened on his table for two or three weeks.  He began carelessly to tear open their covers and to skim the contents of their columns, in which, for the matter of that, there was but little that was new.  He was just on the point of throwing them aside, when he suddenly bounded out of bed as if something had stung him.  In the feuilleton of one of the papers our former acquaintance, M. Jules, communicated to his readers a “painful piece of intelligence.”  “The fascinating, fair Muscovite,” he wrote, “one of the queens of fashion, the ornament of Parisian salons, Madame de Lavretski,” had died almost suddenly.  And this news, unfortunately but too true, had just reached him, M. Jules.  He was, so he continued, he might say, a friend of the deceased—­

Lavretsky put on his clothes, went out into the garden, and walked up and down one of its alleys until the break of day.

At breakfast, next morning, Lemm asked Lavretsky to let him have horses in order to get back to town.

“It is time for me to return to business, that is to lessons,” remarked the old man.  “I am only wasting my time here uselessly.”

Lavretsky did not reply at once.  He seemed lost in a reverie.

“Very good,” he said at last; “I will go with you myself.”