Gurov felt bored already, listening to her.  He was irritated by the naive tone, by this remorse, so unexpected and inopportune; but for the tears in her eyes, he might have thought she was jesting or playing a part.

“I don’t understand,” he said softly.  “What is it you want?”

She hid her face on his breast and pressed close to him.

“Believe me, believe me, I beseech you . . .” she said.  “I love a pure, honest life, and sin is loathsome to me.  I don’t know what I am doing.  Simple people say:  ‘The Evil One has beguiled me.’  And I may say of myself now that the Evil One has beguiled me.”

“Hush, hush! . . .” he muttered.

He looked at her fixed, scared eyes, kissed her, talked softly and affectionately, and by degrees she was comforted, and her gaiety returned; they both began laughing.

Afterwards when they went out there was not a soul on the sea-front.  The town with its cypresses had quite a deathlike air, but the sea still broke noisily on the shore; a single barge was rocking on the waves, and a lantern was blinking sleepily on it.

They found a cab and drove to Oreanda.

“I found out your surname in the hall just now:  it was written on the board—­Von Diderits,” said Gurov.  “Is your husband a German?”

“No; I believe his grandfather was a German, but he is an Orthodox Russian himself.”

At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent.  Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops.  The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us.  So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more.  And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.  Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—­the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—­Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects:  everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

A man walked up to them—­probably a keeper—­looked at them and walked away.  And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too.  They saw a steamer come from Theodosia, with its lights out in the glow of dawn.

“There is dew on the grass,” said Anna Sergeyevna, after a silence.

“Yes.  It’s time to go home.”

They went back to the town.