Abogin did not speak.  The carriage swaying from side to side and crunching over the stones drove up the sandy bank and rolled on its way.  Kirilov moved restlessly and looked about him in misery.  Behind them in the dim light of the stars the road could be seen and the riverside willows vanishing into the darkness.  On the right lay a plain as uniform and as boundless as the sky; here and there in the distance, probably on the peat marshes, dim lights were glimmering.  On the left, parallel with the road, ran a hill tufted with small bushes, and above the hill stood motionless a big, red half-moon, slightly veiled with mist and encircled by tiny clouds, which seemed to be looking round at it from all sides and watching that it did not go away.

In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain.  The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter.  Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape. . . .

The nearer the carriage got to its goal the more impatient Abogin became.  He kept moving, leaping up, looking over the coachman’s shoulder.  And when at last the carriage stopped before the entrance, which was elegantly curtained with striped linen, and when he looked at the lighted windows of the second storey there was an audible catch in his breath.

“If anything happens . . .  I shall not survive it,” he said, going into the hall with the doctor, and rubbing his hands in agitation.  “But there is no commotion, so everything must be going well so far,” he added, listening in the stillness.

There was no sound in the hall of steps or voices and all the house seemed asleep in spite of the lighted windows.  Now the doctor and Abogin, who till then had been in darkness, could see each other clearly.  The doctor was tall and stooped, was untidily dressed and not good-looking.  There was an unpleasantly harsh, morose, and unfriendly look about his lips, thick as a negro’s, his aquiline nose, and listless, apathetic eyes.  His unkempt head and sunken temples, the premature greyness of his long, narrow beard through which his chin was visible, the pale grey hue of his skin and his careless, uncouth manners—­the harshness of all this was suggestive of years of poverty, of ill fortune, of weariness with life and with men.  Looking at his frigid figure one could hardly believe that this man had a wife, that he was capable of weeping over his child.  Abogin presented a very different appearance.  He was a thick-set, sturdy-looking, fair man with a big head and large, soft features; he was elegantly dressed in the very latest fashion.  In his carriage, his closely buttoned coat, his long hair, and his face there was a suggestion of something