All the long day of toil had left no trace in them but lightness of heart.  Before the early dawn all was hushed.  Nothing was to be heard but the night sounds of the frogs that never ceased in the marsh, and the horses snorting in the mist that rose over the meadow before the morning.  Rousing himself, Levin got up from the haycock, and looking at the stars, he saw that the night was over.

“Well, what am I going to do?  How am I to set about it?” he said to himself, trying to express to himself all the thoughts and feelings he had passed through in that brief night.  All the thoughts and feelings he had passed through fell into three separate trains of thought.  One was the renunciation of his old life, of his utterly useless education.  This renunciation gave him satisfaction, and was easy and simple.  Another series of thoughts and mental images related to the life he longed to live now.  The simplicity, the purity, the sanity of this life he felt clearly, and he was convinced he would find in it the content, the peace, and the dignity, of the lack of which he was so miserably conscious.  But a third series of ideas turned upon the question how to effect this transition from the old life to the new.  And there nothing took clear shape for him.  “Have a wife?  Have work and the necessity of work?  Leave Pokrovskoe?  Buy land?  Become a member of a peasant community?  Marry a peasant girl?  How am I to set about it?” he asked himself again, and could not find an answer.  “I haven’t slept all night, though, and I can’t think it out clearly,” he said to himself.  “I’ll work it out later.  One thing’s certain, this night has decided my fate.  All my old dreams of home life were absurd, not the real thing,” he told himself.  “It’s all ever so much simpler and better...”

“How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange, as it were, mother-of-pearl shell of white fleecy cloudlets resting right over his head in the middle of the sky.  “How exquisite it all is in this exquisite night!  And when was there time for that cloud-shell to form?  Just now I looked at the sky, and there was nothing in it—­only two white streaks.  Yes, and so imperceptibly too my views of life changed!”

He went out of the meadow and walked along the highroad towards the village.  A slight wind arose, and the sky looked gray and sullen.  The gloomy moment had come that usually precedes the dawn, the full triumph of light over darkness.

Shrinking from the cold, Levin walked rapidly, looking at the ground.  “What’s that?  Someone coming,” he thought, catching the tinkle of bells, and lifting his head.  Forty paces from him a carriage with four horses harnessed abreast was driving towards him along the grassy road on which he was walking.  The shaft-horses were tilted against the shafts by the ruts, but the dexterous driver sitting on the box held the shaft over the ruts, so that the wheels ran on the smooth part of the road.