“If anything has been said that shouldn’t have been or anything done not to your liking, forgive us,” said an old man, and he bowed down to her and to me.

As we drove home Masha kept looking round at the school; the green roof, which I had painted, and which was glistening in the sun, remained in sight for a long while.  And I felt that the look Masha turned upon it now was one of farewell.

XVI

In the evening she got ready to go to the town.  Of late she had taken to going often to the town and staying the night there.  In her absence I could not work, my hands felt weak and limp; our huge courtyard seemed a dreary, repulsive, empty hole.  The garden was full of angry noises, and without her the house, the trees, the horses were no longer “ours.”

I did not go out of the house, but went on sitting at her table beside her bookshelf with the books on land work, those old favourites no longer wanted and looking at me now so shamefacedly.  For whole hours together, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn night, black as soot, came on outside, I kept examining her old glove, or the pen with which she always wrote, or her little scissors.  I did nothing, and realized clearly that all I had done before, ploughing, mowing, chopping, had only been because she wished it.  And if she had sent me to clean a deep well, where I had to stand up to my waist in deep water, I should have crawled into the well without considering whether it was necessary or not.  And now when she was not near, Dubetchnya, with its ruins, its untidiness, its banging shutters, with its thieves by day and by night, seemed to me a chaos in which any work would be useless.  Besides, what had I to work for here, why anxiety and thought about the future, if I felt that the earth was giving way under my feet, that I had played my part in Dubetchnya, and that the fate of the books on farming was awaiting me too?  Oh, what misery it was at night, in hours of solitude, when I was listening every minute in alarm, as though I were expecting someone to shout that it was time for me to go away!  I did not grieve for Dubetchnya.  I grieved for my love which, too, was threatened with its autumn.  What an immense happiness it is to love and be loved, and how awful to feel that one is slipping down from that high pinnacle!

Masha returned from the town towards the evening of the next day.  She was displeased with something, but she concealed it, and only said, why was it all the window frames had been put in for the winter it was enough to suffocate one.  I took out two frames.  We were not hungry, but we sat down to supper.

“Go and wash your hands,” said my wife; “you smell of putty.”

She had brought some new illustrated papers from the town, and we looked at them together after supper.  There were supplements with fashion plates and patterns.  Masha looked through them casually, and was putting them aside to examine them properly later on; but one dress, with a flat skirt as full as a bell and large sleeves, interested her, and she looked at it for a minute gravely and attentively.