And he tore up the letter; then tears came into his eyes, and feeling that he was cruel, miserable, and to blame, he went out into the fields.

He was only twenty-seven, but he was already stout.  He dressed like an old man in loose, roomy clothes, and suffered from asthma.  He already seemed to be developing the characteristics of an elderly country bachelor.  He never fell in love, never thought of marriage, and loved no one but his mother, his sister, his old nurse, and the gardener, Vassilitch.  He was fond of good fare, of his nap after dinner, and of talking about politics and exalted subjects.  He had in his day taken his degree at the university, but he now looked upon his studies as though in them he had discharged a duty incumbent upon young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five; at any rate, the ideas which now strayed every day through his mind had nothing in common with the university or the subjects he had studied there.

In the fields it was hot and still, as though rain were coming.  It was steaming in the wood, and there was a heavy fragrant scent from the pines and rotting leaves.  Pyotr Mihalitch stopped several times and wiped his wet brow.  He looked at his winter corn and his spring oats, walked round the clover-field, and twice drove away a partridge with its chicks which had strayed in from the wood.  And all the while he was thinking that this insufferable state of things could not go on for ever, and that he must end it one way or another.  End it stupidly, madly, but he must end it.

“But how?  What can I do?” he asked himself, and looked imploringly at the sky and at the trees, as though begging for their help.

But the sky and the trees were mute.  His noble ideas were no help, and his common sense whispered that the agonising question could have no solution but a stupid one, and that to-day’s scene with the messenger was not the last one of its kind.  It was terrible to think what was in store for him!

As he returned home the sun was setting.  By now it seemed to him that the problem was incapable of solution.  He could not accept the accomplished fact, and he could not refuse to accept it, and there was no intermediate course.  When, taking off his hat and fanning himself with his handkerchief, he was walking along the road, and had only another mile and a half to go before he would reach home, he heard bells behind him.  It was a very choice and successful combination of bells, which gave a clear crystal note.  No one had such bells on his horses but the police captain, Medovsky, formerly an officer in the hussars, a man in broken-down health, who had been a great rake and spendthrift, and was a distant relation of Pyotr Mihalitch.  He was like one of the family at the Ivashins’ and had a tender, fatherly affection for Zina, as well as a great admiration for her.

“I was coming to see you,” he said, overtaking Pyotr Mihalitch.  “Get in; I’ll give you a lift.”