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Zinaida turned round, and with outstretched arms and downcast head, she too moved away from the window.

My heart sinking with panic, with a sort of awe-struck horror, I rushed back, and running down the lane, almost letting go my hold of Electric, went back to the bank of the river.

I could not think clearly of anything.

I knew that my cold and reserved father was sometimes seized by fits of fury; and all the same, I could never comprehend what I had just seen...

But I felt at the time that, however long I lived, I could never forget the gesture, the glance, the smile, of Zinaida; that her image, this image so suddenly presented to me, was imprinted for ever on my memory.

I stared vacantly at the river, and never noticed that my tears were streaming.

'She is beaten,' I was thinking,... 'beaten ... beaten...'

'Hullo! what are you doing? Give me the mare!' I heard my father's voice saying behind me.

Mechanically I gave him the bridle. He leaped on to Electric ... the mare, chill with standing, reared on her haunches, and leaped ten feet away ... but my father soon subdued her; he drove the spurs into her sides, and gave her a blow on the neck with his fist... 'Ah, I've no whip,' he muttered.

I remembered the swish and fall of the whip, heard so short a time before, and shuddered.

'Where did you put it?' I asked my father, after a brief pause.

My father made no answer, and galloped on ahead. I overtook him. I felt that I must see his face.

'Were you bored waiting for me?' he muttered through his teeth.

'A little. Where did you drop your whip?' I asked again.

My father glanced quickly at me. 'I didn't drop it,' he replied; 'I threw it away.' He sank into thought, and dropped his head ... and then, for the first, and almost for the last time, I saw how much tenderness and pity his stern features were capable of expressing.

He galloped on again, and this time I could not overtake him; I got home a quarter-of-an-hour after him.

'That's love,' I said to myself again, as I sat at night before my writing-table, on which books and papers had begun to make their appearance; 'that's passion!... To think of not revolting, of bearing a blow from any one whatever ... even the dearest hand! But it seems one can, if one loves...

While I ... I imagined ... '

I had grown much older during the last month; and my love, with all its transports and sufferings, struck me myself as something small and childish and pitiful beside this other unimagined something, which I could hardly fully grasp, and which frightened me like an unknown, beautiful, but menacing face, which one strives in vain to make out clearly in the half-darkness...

A strange and fearful dream came to me that same night.

I dreamed I went into a low dark room...

My father was standing with a whip in his hand, stamping with anger; in the corner crouched Zinaida, and not on her arm, but on her forehead, was a stripe of red ... while behind them both towered Byelovzorov, covered with blood; he opened his white lips, and wrathfully threatened my father.

Two months later, I entered the university; and within six months my father died of a stroke in Petersburg, where he had just moved with my mother and me.

A few days before his death he received a letter from Moscow which threw him into a violent agitation...

He went to my mother to beg some favour of her: and, I was told, he positively shed tears – he, my father! On the very morning of the day when he was stricken down, he had begun a letter to me in French.

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