Nekhludoff went out in silence, but he did not even feel ashamed.  He could see by Matrona Pavlovna’s face that she was blaming him, he knew that she was blaming him with reason and felt that he was doing wrong, but this novel, low animal excitement, having freed itself of all the old feelings of real love for Katusha, ruled supreme, leaving room for nothing else.  He went about as if demented all the evening, now into his aunts’, then back into his own room, then out into the porch, thinking all the time how he could meet her alone; but she avoided him, and Matrona Pavlovna watched her closely.

CHAPTER XVII.

Nekhludoff and Katusha.

And so the evening passed and night came.  The doctor went to bed.  Nekhludoff’s aunts had also retired, and he knew that Matrona Pavlovna was now with them in their bedroom so that Katusha was sure to be alone in the maids’ sitting-room.  He again went out into the porch.  It was dark, damp and warm out of doors, and that white spring mist which drives away the last snow, or is diffused by the thawing of the last snow, filled the air.  From the river under the hill, about a hundred steps from the front door, came a strange sound.  It was the ice breaking.  Nekhludoff came down the steps and went up to the window of the maids’ room, stepping over the puddles on the bits of glazed snow.  His heart was beating so fiercely in his breast that he seemed to hear it, his laboured breath came and went in a burst of long-drawn sighs.  In the maids’ room a small lamp was burning, and Katusha sat alone by the table, looking thoughtfully in front of her.  Nekhludoff stood a long time without moving and waited to see what she, not knowing that she was observed, would do.  For a minute or two she did not move; then she lifted her eyes, smiled and shook her head as if chiding herself, then changed her pose and dropped both her arms on the table and again began gazing down in front of her.  He stood and looked at her, involuntarily listening to the beating of his own heart and the strange sounds from the river.  There on the river, beneath the white mist, the unceasing labour went on, and sounds as of something sobbing, cracking, dropping, being shattered to pieces mixed with the tinkling of the thin bits of ice as they broke against each other like glass.

There he stood, looking at Katusha’s serious, suffering face, which betrayed the inner struggle of her soul, and he felt pity for her; but, strange though it may seem, this pity only confirmed him in his evil intention.