“You dear, darling, precious,” she said, kissing her face and her neck.  “Let us go and have tea on the island!”

“On the island, on the island!” said the precisely similar Nata and Vata, both at once, without a smile.

“But it’s going to rain, my dears.”

“It’s not, it’s not,” cried Lubotchka with a woebegone face.  “They’ve all agreed to go.  Dear! darling!”

“They are all getting ready to have tea on the island,” said Pyotr Dmitritch, coming up.  “See to arranging things. . . .  We will all go in the boats, and the samovars and all the rest of it must be sent in the carriage with the servants.”

He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm.  Olga Mihalovna had a desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting, even about her dowry perhaps—­the crueller the better, she felt.  She thought a little, and said: 

“Why is it Count Alexey Petrovitch hasn’t come?  What a pity!”

“I am very glad he hasn’t come,” said Pyotr Dmitritch, lying.  “I’m sick to death of that old lunatic.”

“But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!”

III

Half an hour later all the guests were crowding on the bank near the pile to which the boats were fastened.  They were all talking and laughing, and were in such excitement and commotion that they could hardly get into the boats.  Three boats were crammed with passengers, while two stood empty.  The keys for unfastening these two boats had been somehow mislaid, and messengers were continually running from the river to the house to look for them.  Some said Grigory had the keys, others that the bailiff had them, while others suggested sending for a blacksmith and breaking the padlocks.  And all talked at once, interrupting and shouting one another down.  Pyotr Dmitritch paced impatiently to and fro on the bank, shouting: 

“What the devil’s the meaning of it!  The keys ought always to be lying in the hall window!  Who has dared to take them away?  The bailiff can get a boat of his own if he wants one!”

At last the keys were found.  Then it appeared that two oars were missing.  Again there was a great hullabaloo.  Pyotr Dmitritch, who was weary of pacing about the bank, jumped into a long, narrow boat hollowed out of the trunk of a poplar, and, lurching from side to side and almost falling into the water, pushed off from the bank.  The other boats followed him one after another, amid loud laughter and the shrieks of the young ladies.

The white cloudy sky, the trees on the riverside, the boats with the people in them, and the oars, were reflected in the water as in a mirror; under the boats, far away below in the bottomless depths, was a second sky with the birds flying across it.  The bank on which the house and gardens stood was high, steep, and covered with trees; on the other, which was sloping, stretched broad green water-meadows with sheets of water glistening in them.  The boats had floated a hundred yards when, behind the mournfully drooping willows on the sloping banks, huts and a herd of cows came into sight; they began to hear songs, drunken shouts, and the strains of a concertina.