'My enemy's weapons have weakened in the end, and his memory hath perished amid noise.

Well, we'll talk it over with him without noise." The old man tried to speak calmly and with a contemptuous smile, but the smile did not come; his wrinkles quivered irritably, and his small eyes had a particularly clear brilliancy.
"Write to him again, Lubovka.

'Come along!' write him, 'don't be afraid to come!'" Lubov wrote Taras another letter, but this time it was shorter and more reserved, and now she awaited a reply from day to day, attempting to picture to herself what sort of man he must be, this mysterious brother of hers.

Before she used to think of him with sinking heart, with that solemn respect with which believers think of martyrs, men of upright life; now she feared him, for he had acquired the right to be judge over men and life at the price of painful sufferings, at the cost of his youth, which was ruined in exile.

On coming, he would ask her: "You are marrying of your own free will, for love, are you not ?" What should she tell him?
Would he forgive her faint-heartedness?
And why does she marry?
Can it really be possible that this is all she can do in order to change her life?
Gloomy thoughts sprang up one after another in the head of the girl and confused and tortured her, impotent as she was to set up against them some definite, all-conquering desire.