But Ognev was rapidly walking away from the house and was not listening.  His heart, warmed by the wine, was brimming over with good-humour, friendliness, and sadness.  He walked along thinking how frequently one met with good people, and what a pity it was that nothing was left of those meetings but memories.  At times one catches a glimpse of cranes on the horizon, and a faint gust of wind brings their plaintive, ecstatic cry, and a minute later, however greedily one scans the blue distance, one cannot see a speck nor catch a sound; and like that, people with their faces and their words flit through our lives and are drowned in the past, leaving nothing except faint traces in the memory.  Having been in the N——­ District from the early spring, and having been almost every day at the friendly Kuznetsovs’, Ivan Alexeyitch had become as much at home with the old man, his daughter, and the servants as though they were his own people; he had grown familiar with the whole house to the smallest detail, with the cosy verandah, the windings of the avenues, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the bath-house; but as soon as he was out of the gate all this would be changed to memory and would lose its meaning as reality for ever, and in a year or two all these dear images would grow as dim in his consciousness as stories he had read or things he had imagined.

“Nothing in life is so precious as people!” Ognev thought in his emotion, as he strode along the avenue to the gate.  “Nothing!”

It was warm and still in the garden.  There was a scent of the mignonette, of the tobacco-plants, and of the heliotrope, which were not yet over in the flower-beds.  The spaces between the bushes and the tree-trunks were filled with a fine soft mist soaked through and through with moonlight, and, as Ognev long remembered, coils of mist that looked like phantoms slowly but perceptibly followed one another across the avenue.  The moon stood high above the garden, and below it transparent patches of mist were floating eastward.  The whole world seemed to consist of nothing but black silhouettes and wandering white shadows.  Ognev, seeing the mist on a moonlight August evening almost for the first time in his life, imagined he was seeing, not nature, but a stage effect in which unskilful workmen, trying to light up the garden with white Bengal fire, hid behind the bushes and let off clouds of white smoke together with the light.

When Ognev reached the garden gate a dark shadow moved away from the low fence and came towards him.

“Vera Gavrilovna!” he said, delighted.  “You here?  And I have been looking everywhere for you; wanted to say good-bye. . . .  Good-bye; I am going away!”

“So early?  Why, it’s only eleven o’clock.”

“Yes, it’s time I was off.  I have a four-mile walk and then my packing.  I must be up early to-morrow.”