But the storm-clouds, turning white and then black, moved down so quickly that they had to quicken their pace to get home before the rain.  The foremost clouds, lowering and black as soot-laden smoke, rushed with extraordinary swiftness over the sky.  They were still two hundred paces from home and a gust of wind had already blown up, and every second the downpour might be looked for.

The children ran ahead with frightened and gleeful shrieks.  Darya Alexandrovna, struggling painfully with her skirts that clung round her legs, was not walking, but running, her eyes fixed on the children.  The men of the party, holding their hats on, strode with long steps beside her.  They were just at the steps when a big drop fell splashing on the edge of the iron guttering.  The children and their elders after them ran into the shelter of the house, talking merrily.

“Katerina Alexandrovna?” Levin asked of Agafea Mihalovna, who met them with kerchiefs and rugs in the hall.

“We thought she was with you,” she said.

“And Mitya?”

“In the copse, he must be, and the nurse with him.”

Levin snatched up the rugs and ran towards the copse.

In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on, covering the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse.  Stubbornly, as though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin, and tearing the leaves and flowers off the lime trees and stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything on one side—­acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, and tall tree-tops.  The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into shelter in the servants’ quarters.  The streaming rain had already flung its white veil over all the distant forest and half the fields close by, and was rapidly swooping down upon the copse.  The wet of the rain spurting up in tiny drops could be smelt in the air.

Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the wind that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving up to the copse and had just caught sight of something white behind the oak tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead.  Opening his blinded eyes, Levin gazed through the thick veil of rain that separated him now from the copse, and to his horror the first thing he saw was the green crest of the familiar oak-tree in the middle of the copse uncannily changing its position.  “Can it have been struck?” Levin hardly had time to think when, moving more and more rapidly, the oak tree vanished behind the other trees, and he heard the crash of the great tree falling upon the others.

The flash of lightning, the crash of thunder, and the instantaneous chill that ran through him were all merged for Levin in one sense of terror.

“My God! my God! not on them!” he said.

And though he thought at once how senseless was his prayer that they should not have been killed by the oak which had fallen now, he repeated it, knowing that he could do nothing better than utter this senseless prayer.