He remembered his own deliberate frankness.

And all this had a touching significance for him.

Not only friends and relatives, not only people who had been indifferent to him, but even those who did not like him, seemed to have agreed to become fonder of him, or to forgive him, before his departure, as people do before confession or death.

'Perhaps I shall not return from the Caucasus,' he thought.

And he felt that he loved his friends and some one besides.