They walked along the road.  Now the trees did not obscure the view, and one could see the sky and the distance.  As though covered with a veil all nature was hidden in a transparent, colourless haze through which her beauty peeped gaily; where the mist was thicker and whiter it lay heaped unevenly about the stones, stalks, and bushes or drifted in coils over the road, clung close to the earth and seemed trying not to conceal the view.  Through the haze they could see all the road as far as the wood, with dark ditches at the sides and tiny bushes which grew in the ditches and caught the straying wisps of mist.  Half a mile from the gate they saw the dark patch of Kuznetsov’s wood.

“Why has she come with me?  I shall have to see her back,” thought Ognev, but looking at her profile he gave a friendly smile and said:  “One doesn’t want to go away in such lovely weather.  It’s quite a romantic evening, with the moon, the stillness, and all the etceteras.  Do you know, Vera Gavrilovna, here I have lived twenty-nine years in the world and never had a romance.  No romantic episode in my whole life, so that I only know by hearsay of rendezvous, ’avenues of sighs,’ and kisses.  It’s not normal!  In town, when one sits in one’s lodgings, one does not notice the blank, but here in the fresh air one feels it. . . .  One resents it!”

“Why is it?”

“I don’t know.  I suppose I’ve never had time, or perhaps it was I have never met women who. . . .  In fact, I have very few acquaintances and never go anywhere.”

For some three hundred paces the young people walked on in silence.  Ognev kept glancing at Verotchka’s bare head and shawl, and days of spring and summer rose to his mind one after another.  It had been a period when far from his grey Petersburg lodgings, enjoying the friendly warmth of kind people, nature, and the work he loved, he had not had time to notice how the sunsets followed the glow of dawn, and how, one after another foretelling the end of summer, first the nightingale ceased singing, then the quail, then a little later the landrail.  The days slipped by unnoticed, so that life must have been happy and easy.  He began calling aloud how reluctantly he, poor and unaccustomed to change of scene and society, had come at the end of April to the N——­ District, where he had expected dreariness, loneliness, and indifference to statistics, which he considered was now the foremost among the sciences.  When he arrived on an April morning at the little town of N——­ he had put up at the inn kept by Ryabuhin, the Old Believer, where for twenty kopecks a day they had given him a light, clean room on condition that he should not smoke indoors.  After resting and finding who was the president of the District Zemstvo, he had set off at once on foot to Kuznetsov.  He had to walk three miles through lush meadows and young copses.  Larks were hovering in the clouds, filling the air with silvery notes, and rooks flapping their wings with sedate dignity floated over the green cornland.