a sentimental man, but he was so touched by these words of his wife that his face burned:—
"Viérotchka, my dearest, you have reproached me." His voice for the second and last time in his life trembled. The first time that his voice trembled it was from doubt arising from conjecturing his position; now it trembled from pleasure. "You have reproached me, but this reproach is dearer to me than all the words of love. I offended you with my question, but how happy I am that my bad question gave me, brought me, such a reproach. Look, there are tears in my eyes, the first tears that I have shed since I was a boy!"
The whole evening long he scarcely took his eyes from her, and she never once thought that he was making an effort to appear tender to her; and this evening was one of the happiest of her life, at least, up to the present time. Several years after the time of which I am now telling you about her, she will have a good many such days, months, years; this will be when her children shall have grown up, and she will find in them people worthy of happiness and sure of it. This pleasure is higher than all other individual pleasures; whatever may appear in any other personal pleasure is a rare and transitory loftiness; with her it is an ordinary, every-day level of happiness. But this is in the future which will come to her.
XXI.
But after his wife had gone to sleep sitting on his knees, after he laid her down on her little sofa, Lopukhóf began to think seriously about her dream. It was not his affair whether she loved him or not; that was her concern, over which he had no control, and over which as he himself plainly saw, he had no control. This will settle itself; there is no need of thinking about it to-day; let time tell; but now there is no time for it; it is now his business to find out what is the cause of her foreboding that she does not love him.
For the first time he sat a long while in these thoughts; already for the last few days he has seen that he is not retaining her love for him. A great loss; but what could be done about it? If he could exchange his nature, acquire a tendency towards that gentle fondness which her nature demanded, then of course it would be a different thing. But
