“Judging from the voice and the weeping I took it to be a little girl of ten or twelve.  She walked irresolutely into the summer-house, sat down, and began half-praying, half-complaining aloud. . . .

“‘Merciful God!’ she said, crying, ’it’s unbearable.  It’s beyond all endurance!  I suffer in silence, but I want to live too. . . .  Oh, my God!  My God!’

“And so on in the same style.

“I wanted to look at the child and speak to her.  So as not to frighten her I first gave a loud sigh and coughed, then cautiously struck a match. . . .  There was a flash of bright light in the darkness, which lighted up the weeping figure.  It was Kisotchka!”

“Marvels upon marvels!” said Von Schtenberg with a sigh.  “Black night, the murmur of the sea; she in grief, he with a sensation of world—­solitude. . . .  It’s too much of a good thing. . . .  You only want Circassians with daggers to complete it.”

“I am not telling you a tale, but fact.”

“Well, even if it is a fact . . . it all proves nothing, and there is nothing new in it. . . .”

“Wait a little before you find fault!  Let me finish,” said Ananyev, waving his hand with vexation; “don’t interfere, please!  I am not telling you, but the doctor. . . .  Well,” he went on, addressing me and glancing askance at the student who bent over his books and seemed very well satisfied at having gibed at the engineer—­“well, Kisotchka was not surprised or frightened at seeing me.  It seemed as though she had known beforehand that she would find me in the summer-house.  She was breathing in gasps and trembling all over as though in a fever, while her tear-stained face, so far as I could distinguish it as I struck match after match, was not the intelligent, submissive weary face I had seen before, but something different, which I cannot understand to this day.  It did not express pain, nor anxiety, nor misery—­nothing of what was expressed by her words and her tears. . . .  I must own that, probably because I did not understand it, it looked to me senseless and as though she were drunk.

“‘I can’t bear it,’ muttered Kisotchka in the voice of a crying child.  ’It’s too much for me, Nikolay Anastasyitch.  Forgive me, Nikolav Anastasyitch.  I can’t go on living like this. . . .  I am going to the town to my mother’s. . . .  Take me there. . . .  Take me there, for God’s sake!’

“In the presence of tears I can neither speak nor be silent.  I was flustered and muttered some nonsense trying to comfort her.

“‘No, no; I will go to my mother’s,’ said Kisotchka resolutely, getting up and clutching my arm convulsively (her hands and her sleeves were wet with tears).  ’Forgive me, Nikolay Anastasyitch, I am going. . . .  I can bear no more. . . .’

“‘Kisotchka, but there isn’t a single cab,’ I said.  ’How can you go?’

“‘No matter, I’ll walk. . . .  It’s not far.  I can’t bear it. . . .’

“I was embarrassed, but not touched.  Kisotchka’s tears, her trembling, and the blank expression of her face suggested to me a trivial, French or Little Russian melodrama, in which every ounce of cheap shallow feeling is washed down with pints of tears.