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went off the track a bit.… You may have heard …”
    Vasily Nikolaevich, evidently sorry for his master, said with smiling eyes: “Is it about Stepanida?”
    “Why, yes. Look here. Please, please do not engageher to help in the house. You understand, it is very awkward for me …”
    “Yes, it must have been Vanya the clerk who arranged it.”
    “Yes, please … and hadn’t the rest of the phosphate better be strewn?” said Yevgeny, to hide his confusion.
    “Yes, I am just going to see to it.”
    So the matter ended, and Yevgeny calmed down, hoping that as he had lived for a year without seeing her, so things would go on now. “Besides, Vasily Nikolaevich will speak to Ivan the clerk; Ivan will speak to her, and she will understand that I don’t want it,” said Yevgeny to himself, and he was glad he had forced himself to speak to Vasily Nikolaevich, hard as it had been to do so.
    “Yes, it is better, much better, than that feeling of doubt, that feeling of shame.” He shuddered at the mere remembrance of his sin in thought.

XII
    The moral effort he had made to overcome his shame and speak to Vasily Nikolaevich tranquillized Yevgeny. It seemed to him that the matter was all over now. Liza at once noticed that he was quite calm, and even happier than usual. “No doubt he was upset by our mothers pin-pricking one another. It really is disagreeable, especially for him who is so sensitive and noble, always to hear such unfriendly and ill-mannered insinuations,” thought she.
    The next day was Trinity Sunday. It was a beautiful day, and the peasant-women, on their way into the woods to plait wreaths, came, according to custom, to the landowner’s home and began to sing and dance. Marya Pavlovna and Varvara Alexeevna came out onto the porch in smart clothes, carrying sunshades, and went up to the ring of singers. With them, in a jacket of Chinese silk, came out the uncle, a flabby libertine and drunkard, who was living that summer with Yevgeny.
    As usual there was a bright, many-coloured ring of young women and girls, the centre of everything, and around these from different sides like attendant planets that had detached themselves and were circling round, went girls hand in hand, rustling in their new print gowns; young lads giggling and running backwards and forwards after one another; full-grown lads in dark blue or black coats and caps and with red shirts, who unceasingly spat out sunflower-seed shells; and the domestic servants or other outsiders watching the dance-circlefrom aside. Both the old ladies went close up to the ring, and Liza accompanied them in a light blue dress, with light blue ribbons on her head, and with wide sleeves under which her long white arms and angular elbows were visible.
    Yevgeny did not wish to come out, but it was ridiculous to hide, and he too came out onto the porch smoking a cigarette, bowed to the men and lads, and talked with one of them. The women meanwhile shouted a dance-song with all their might, snapping their fingers, clapping their hands, and dancing.
    “They are calling for the master,” said a youngster coming up to Yevgeny’s wife, who had not noticed the call. Liza called Yevgeny to look at the dance and at one of the women dancers who particularly pleased her. This was Stepanida. She wore a yellow skirt, a velveteen sleeveless jacket and a silk kerchief, and was broad, energetic, ruddy, and merry. No doubt she danced well. He saw nothing.
    “Yes, yes,” he said, removing and replacing his pince-nez. “Yes, yes,” he repeated. “So it seems I cannot be rid of her,” he thought.
    He did not look at her, fearing her attraction, and just on that account what his passing glance caught of her seemed to him especially attractive. Besides this he saw by her sparkling look that she saw him and saw that he admired her. He stood there as long as propriety demanded, and seeing that Varvara Alexeevna hadcalled her “my dear” senselessly and insincerely and was