Seeking for some explanation, she could not understand how it was she did not pull away the hand to which Ilyin was clinging like a leech, and why, like Ilyin, she hastily glanced to right and to left to see whether any one was looking.  The clouds and the pines stood motionless, looking at them severely, like old ushers seeing mischief, but bribed not to tell the school authorities.  The sentry stood like a post on the embankment and seemed to be looking at the seat.

“Let him look,” thought Sofya Petrovna.

“But . . . but listen,” she said at last, with despair in her voice.  “What can come of this?  What will be the end of this?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he whispered, waving off the disagreeable questions.

They heard the hoarse, discordant whistle of the train.  This cold, irrelevant sound from the everyday world of prose made Sofya Petrovna rouse herself.

“I can’t stay . . . it’s time I was at home,” she said, getting up quickly.  “The train is coming in. . .  Andrey is coming by it!  He will want his dinner.”

Sofya Petrovna turned towards the embankment with a burning face.  The engine slowly crawled by, then came the carriages.  It was not the local train, as she had supposed, but a goods train.  The trucks filed by against the background of the white church in a long string like the days of a man’s life, and it seemed as though it would never end.

But at last the train passed, and the last carriage with the guard and a light in it had disappeared behind the trees.  Sofya Petrovna turned round sharply, and without looking at Ilyin, walked rapidly back along the track.  She had regained her self-possession.  Crimson with shame, humiliated not by Ilyin—­no, but by her own cowardice, by the shamelessness with which she, a chaste and high-principled woman, had allowed a man, not her husband, to hug her knees—­she had only one thought now:  to get home as quickly as possible to her villa, to her family.  The lawyer could hardly keep pace with her.  Turning from the clearing into a narrow path, she turned round and glanced at him so quickly that she saw nothing but the sand on his knees, and waved to him to drop behind.

Reaching home, Sofya Petrovna stood in the middle of her room for five minutes without moving, and looked first at the window and then at her writing-table.

“You low creature!” she said, upbraiding herself.  “You low creature!”

To spite herself, she recalled in precise detail, keeping nothing back—­she recalled that though all this time she had been opposed to Ilyin’s lovemaking, something had impelled her to seek an interview with him; and what was more, when he was at her feet she had enjoyed it enormously.  She recalled it all without sparing herself, and now, breathless with shame, she would have liked to slap herself in the face.

“Poor Andrey!” she said to herself, trying as she thought of her husband to put into her face as tender an expression as she could.  “Varya, my poor little girl, doesn’t know what a mother she has!  Forgive me, my dear ones!  I love you so much . . . so much!”