It was past ten, and for summer-villa people that was late.

“How dark it is! One can’t see a bit,” said Yulia, as she went with them to the gate. “I don’t know how you’ll find your way. But, isn’t it cold?”

She wrapped herself up more closely and walked back to the porch.

“I suppose my Alexey’s playing cards somewhere,” she called to them. “Good-night!”

After the lighted rooms nothing could be seen. Yartsev and Kostya groped their way like blind men to the railway embankment and crossed it.

“One can’t see a thing,” said Kostya in his bass voice, standing still and gazing at the sky. “And the stars, the stars, they are like new threepenny-bits. Gavrilitch!”

“Ah?” Yartsev responded somewhere in the darkness.

“I say, one can’t see a thing. Where are you?”

Yartsev went up to him whistling, and took his arm.

“Hi, there, you summer visitors!” Kostya shouted at the top of his voice. “We’ve caught a socialist.”

When he was exhilarated he was always very rowdy, shouting, wrangling with policemen and cabdrivers, singing, and laughing violently.

“Nature be damned,” he shouted.

“Come, come,” said Yartsev, trying to pacify him. “You mustn’t. Please don’t.”

Soon the friends grew accustomed to the darkness, and were able to distinguish the outlines of the tall pines and telegraph posts. From time to time the sound of whistles reached them from the station and the telegraph wires hummed plaintively. From the copse itself there came no sound, and there was a feeling of pride, strength, and mystery in its silence, and on the right it seemed that the tops of the pines were almost touching the sky. The friends found their path and walked along it. There it was quite dark, and it was only from the long strip of sky dotted with stars, and from the firmly trodden earth under their feet, that they could tell they were walking along a path. They walked along side by in silence, and it seemed to both of them that people were coming to meet them. Their tipsy exhilaration passed off. The fancy came into Yartsev’s mind that perhaps that copse was haunted by the spirits of the Muscovite Tsars, boyars, and patriarchs, and he was on the point of telling Kostya about it, but he checked himself.

When they reached the town gate there was a faint light of dawn in the sky. Still in silence, Yartsev and Kotchevoy walked along the wooden pavement, by the cheap summer cottages, eating-houses, timber-stacks. Under the arch of interlacing branches, the damp air was fragrant of lime-trees, and then a broad, long street opened before them, and on it, not a soul, not a light.…When they reached the Red Pond, it was daylight.

“Moscow—it’s a town that will have to suffer a great deal more,” said Yartsev, looking at the Alexyevsky Monastery.

“What put that into your head?”

“I don’t know. I love Moscow.”

Both Yartsev and Kostya had been born in Moscow, and adored the town, and felt for some reason antagonistic to every other town. Both were convinced that Moscow was a remarkable town, and Russia