There was a perfect tempest within him.  He felt a longing to do something extraordinary, startling, even if he had to repent of it all his life afterwards.  Should he call Vlassitch a blackguard, slap him in the face, and then challenge him to a duel?  But Vlassitch was not one of those men who do fight duels; being called a blackguard and slapped in the face would only make him more unhappy, and would make him shrink into himself more than ever.  These unhappy, defenceless people are the most insufferable, the most tiresome creatures in the world.  They can do anything with impunity.  When the luckless man responds to well-deserved reproach by looking at you with eyes full of deep and guilty feeling, and with a sickly smile bends his head submissively, even justice itself could not lift its hand against him.

“No matter.  I’ll horsewhip him before her eyes and tell him what I think of him,” Pyotr Mihalitch decided.

He was riding through his wood and waste land, and he imagined Zina would try to justify her conduct by talking about the rights of women and individual freedom, and about there being no difference between legal marriage and free union.  Like a woman, she would argue about what she did not understand.  And very likely at the end she would ask, “How do you come in?  What right have you to interfere?”

“No, I have no right,” muttered Pyotr Mihalitch.  “But so much the better. . . .  The harsher I am, the less right I have to interfere, the better.”

It was sultry.  Clouds of gnats hung over the ground and in the waste places the peewits called plaintively.  Everything betokened rain, but he could not see a cloud in the sky.  Pyotr Mihalitch crossed the boundary of his estate and galloped over a smooth, level field.  He often went along this road and knew every bush, every hollow in it.  What now in the far distance looked in the dusk like a dark cliff was a red church; he could picture it all down to the smallest detail, even the plaster on the gate and the calves that were always grazing in the church enclosure.  Three-quarters of a mile to the right of the church there was a copse like a dark blur—­it was Count Koltonovitch’s.  And beyond the church Vlassitch’s estate began.

From behind the church and the count’s copse a huge black storm-cloud was rising, and there were ashes of white lightning.

“Here it is!” thought Pyotr Mihalitch.  “Lord help us, Lord help us!”

The horse was soon tired after its quick gallop, and Pyotr Mihalitch was tired too.  The storm-cloud looked at him angrily and seemed to advise him to go home.  He felt a little scared.

“I will prove to them they are wrong,” he tried to reassure himself.  “They will say that it is free-love, individual freedom; but freedom means self-control and not subjection to passion.  It’s not liberty but license!”

He reached the count’s big pond; it looked dark blue and frowning under the cloud, and a smell of damp and slime rose from it.  Near the dam, two willows, one old and one young, drooped tenderly towards one another.  Pyotr Mihalitch and Vlassitch had been walking near this very spot only a fortnight before, humming a students’ song: