And he did not finish the question, and yawned again, shivering and shaking all over.

Memories--bright and gloomy--fretted him alike; suddenly it crossed his mind how some days before she had sat down to the piano and sung before him and Ernest the song, "Old husband, cruel husband!" He recalled the expression of her face, the strange light in her eyes, and the colour on her cheeks--and he got up from his seat, he would have liked to go to them, to tell them: "You were wrong to play your tricks on me; my great-grandfather used to hang the peasants up by their ribs, and my grandfather was himself a peasant," and to kill them both.

Then all at once it seemed to him as if all that was happening was a dream, scarcely even a dream, but some kind of foolish joke; that he need only shake himself and look round...

He looked round, and like a! hawk clutching its captured prey, anguish gnawed deeper and deeper into his heart.

To complete it all Lavretsky had been hoping in a few months to be a father....