And as usual he began slowly and emphatically saying what everybody knew.

Nikitin’s first lesson was on Russian language in the second class. When at nine o’clock punctually he went into the class-room, he saw written on the blackboard two large letters—M. S. That, no doubt, meant Masha Shelestov.

‘They’ve scented it out already, the rascals …’ thought Nikitin. ‘How is it they know everything?’

The second lesson was in the fifth class. And there two letters, M. S., were written on the blackboard; and when he went out of the class-room at the end of the lesson, he heard the shout behind him as though from a theatre gallery:

‘Hurrah for Masha Shelestov!’

His head was heavy from sleeping in his clothes, his limbs were weighed down with inertia. The boys, who were expecting every day to break up before the examinations, did nothing, were restless, and so bored that they got into mischief. Nikitin, too, was restless, did not notice their pranks, and was continually going to the window. He could see the street brilliantly lighted up with the sun; above the houses the blue limpid sky, the birds, and far, far away, beyond the gardens and the houses, vast indefinite distance, the forests in the blue haze, the smoke from a passing train. …

Here two officers in white tunics, playing with their whips, passed in the street in the shade of the acacias. Here a lot of Jews, with grey beards, and caps on, drove past in a waggonette. … The governess walked by with the director’s granddaughter. Som ran by in the company of two other dogs. … And then Varya, wearing a simple grey dress and red stockings, carrying the ‘Vyestnik Evropi’ in her hand, passed by. She must have been to the town library. …

And it would be a long time before lessons were over at three o’clock! And after school he could not go home nor to the Shelestovs’, but must go to give a lesson at Wolf’s. This Wolf, a wealthy Jew who had turned Lutheran, did not send his children to the high school, but had them taught at home by the high- school masters, and paid five roubles a lesson.

He was bored, bored, bored.

At three o’clock he went to Wolf’s and spent there, as it seemed to him, an eternity. He left there at five o’clock, and before seven he had to be at the high school again to a meeting of the masters—to draw up the plan for the viva voce examination of the fourth and sixth classes.

When late in the evening he left the high school and went to the Shelestovs’, his heart was beating and his face was flushed. A month before, even a week before, he had, every time that he made up his mind to speak to her, prepared a whole speech, with an introduction and a conclusion. Now he had not one word ready; everything was in a muddle in his head, and all he knew was that to-day he would certainly declare himself, and that it was utterly impossible to wait any longer.

‘I will ask her to come to the garden,’ he thought; ‘we’ll walk about a little and I’ll speak.’

There was not a soul in the hall; he went into the dining-room and then into the drawing-room. … There was no one there either. He could hear Varya arguing with someone upstairs and the clink of the dressmaker’s scissors in the nursery.

There was a little room in the house which had three names: the little room, the passage room, and the dark room. There was a big cupboard in it where they kept medicines, gunpowder, and their hunting gear. Leading from this room to the first floor was a narrow wooden staircase where cats were always asleep. There were two doors in it—one leading to the nursery, one to the drawing-room. When Nikitin went into this room to go upstairs, the door from the nursery opened and shut with such a bang that it