shone with steady brilliance; its light was shot in an azure stream over the sky, and fell in patches of smoky gold on the thin clouds as they drifted near.  The freshness of the air drew a slight moisture into the eyes, sweetly folded all the limbs, and flowed freely into the lungs.  Lavretsky rejoiced in it, and was glad at his own rejoicing.  “Come, we are still alive,” he thought; “we have not been altogether destroyed by”—­he did not say—­by whom or by what.  Then he fell to thinking of Lisa, that she could hardly love Panshin, that if he had met her under different circumstances—­God knows what might have come of it; that he undertook Lemm though Lisa had no words of “her own:”  but that, he thought, was not true; she had words of her own.  “Don’t speak light of that,” came back to Lavretsky’s mind.  He rode a long way with his head bent in thought, then drawing himself up, he slowly repeated aloud: 

   “And I have burnt all I adored,
    And now I adore all that I burnt.”

Then he gave his horse a switch with the whip, and galloped all the way home.

Dismounting from his horse, he looked round for the last time with an involuntary smile of gratitude.  Night, still, kindly night stretched over hills and valleys; from afar, out of its fragrant depths—­God knows whence—­whether from the heavens or the earth—­rose a soft, gentle warmth.  Lavretsky sent a last greeting to Lisa, and ran up the steps.

The next day passed rather dully.  Rain was falling from early morning; Lemm wore a scowl, and kept more and more tightly compressing his lips, as though he had taken an oath never to open them again.  When he went to his room, Lavretsky took up to bed with him a whole bundle of French newspapers, which had been lying for more than fortnight on his table unopened.  He began indifferently to tear open the wrappings, and glanced hastily over the columns of the newspapers—­in which, however, there was nothing new.  He was just about to throw them down—­and all at once he leaped out of bed as if he had been stung.  In an article in one of the papers, M. Jules, with whom we are already familiar, communicated to his readers a “mournful intelligence, that charming, fascinating Moscow lady,” he wrote, “one of the queens of fashion, who adorned Parisian salons, Madame de Lavretsky, had died almost suddenly, and this intelligence, unhappily only too well-founded, had only just reached him, M. Jules.  He was,” so he continued, “he might say a friend of the deceased.”

Lavretsky dressed, went out into the garden, and till morning he walked up and down the same path.

Chapter XXVIII