of the last few days. In spite of the warm sun which shone on the thick foliage of the trees, it was cool in the shade.
She shivered both from the coolness and from the sentiment of fear which in the cool air seized her with new force.
"Go, go and find Mariette," said she to Serozha, who had followed her; and then she began to walk up and down on the straw carpet which covered the terrace. "Will they not forgive me?" she asked herself. "Will they not understand that all this could not possibly have been otherwise?"
As she stopped and looked at the top of the aspens waving in the wind, with their freshly washed leaves glittering brightly in the cool sunbeams, it seemed to her that they would not forgive her, that all, that everything, would be as pitiless toward her as that sky and that foliage. And again she felt that mysterious sense in her inmost soul that she was in a dual state.
"I must not, must not think," she said to herself. "I must have courage. Where shall I go? When? Whom shall I take? Yes! to Moscow by the evening train, with Annushka and Serozha and only the most necessary things. But first I must write to them both."
She hurried back into the house to her boudoir, sat down at the table, and wrote her husband: —
After what has passed, I cannot longer remain in your house. I am going away, and I shall take my son. I do not know the laws, and so I do not know with which of his parents the child should remain; but I take him with me, because I cannot live without him. Be magnanimous; let me have him.
Up to this point she wrote rapidly and naturally; but this appeal to a magnanimity which she had never seen in him, and the need of ending her letter with something affecting, brought her to a halt.
"I cannot speak of my fault and my repentance, because ...." Again she stopped, unable to find the right words to express her thoughts. "No," she said, "nothing more is necessary;" and, tearing up this
