It was more likely than anything else to be the reflection of some outside light, but though I strained my eyes to the utmost, I could not see one other speck of light in the vast expanse that lay before me.  There was no moon.  The pale and, by now, quite dim streak of the afterglow could not have been reflected, for the window looked not to the west, but to the east.  These and other similar considerations were straying through my mind all the while that I was going down the slope with the horse.  At the bottom I sat down by the roadside and looked again at the light.  As before it was glimmering and flaring up.

“Strange,” I thought, lost in conjecture.  “Very strange.”

And little by little I was overcome by an unpleasant feeling.  At first I thought that this was vexation at not being able to explain a simple phenomenon; but afterwards, when I suddenly turned away from the light in horror and caught hold of Pashka with one hand, it became clear that I was overcome with terror....

I was seized with a feeling of loneliness, misery, and horror, as though I had been flung down against my will into this great hole full of shadows, where I was standing all alone with the belfry looking at me with its red eye.

“Pashka!” I cried, closing my eyes in horror.

“Well?”

“Pashka, what’s that gleaming on the belfry?”

Pashka looked over my shoulder at the belfry and gave a yawn.

“Who can tell?”

This brief conversation with the boy reassured me for a little, but not for long.  Pashka, seeing my uneasiness, fastened his big eyes upon the light, looked at me again, then again at the light....

“I am frightened,” he whispered.

At this point, beside myself with terror, I clutched the boy with one hand, huddled up to him, and gave the horse a violent lash.

“It’s stupid!” I said to myself.  “That phenomenon is only terrible because I don’t understand it; everything we don’t understand is mysterious.”

I tried to persuade myself, but at the same time I did not leave off lashing the horse.  When we reached the posting station I purposely stayed for a full hour chatting with the overseer, and read through two or three newspapers, but the feeling of uneasiness did not leave me.  On the way back the light was not to be seen, but on the other hand the silhouettes of the huts, of the poplars, and of the hill up which I had to drive, seemed to me as though animated.  And why the light was there I don’t know to this day.

The second terror I experienced was excited by a circumstance no less trivial....  I was returning from a romantic interview.  It was one o’clock at night, the time when nature is buried in the soundest, sweetest sleep before the dawn.  That time nature was not sleeping, and one could not call the night a still one.  Corncrakes, quails, nightingales, and woodcocks were calling, crickets and grasshoppers were chirruping.  There was a light mist over the grass, and clouds were scurrying straight ahead across the sky near the moon.  Nature was awake, as though afraid of missing the best moments of her life.