I know that I woke struggling to keep him with me, crying out that he was not to leave me, that that way was danger....  I woke to find my room flooded with sunshine, and my old woman looking at me with disapproval.

“Wake up, Barin,” she was saying, “it’s three o’clock.”

“Three o’clock?” I muttered, trying to pull myself together.

“Three in the afternoon...  I have some tea for you.”

When I realised the time I had the sensation of the wildest panic.  I jumped from my bed, pushing the old woman out of the room.  I had betrayed my trust!  I had betrayed my trust!  I felt assured ’that some awful catastrophe had occurred, something that I might have prevented.  When I was dressed, disregarding my housekeeper’s cries, I rushed out into the street.  At my end of the Ekaterinsgofsky Canal I was stopped by great throngs of men and women returning homewards from the procession.  They were marching, most of them, in ordered lines across the street, arm in arm, singing the “Marseillaise.”

Very different from the procession a few weeks before.  That had been dumb, cowed, bewildered.  This was the movement of a people conscious of their freedom, sure of themselves, disdaining the world.  Everywhere bands were playing, banners were glittering, and from the very heart of the soil, as it seemed, the “Marseillaise” was rising.

Although the sun only shone at brief intervals, there was a sense of spring warmth in the air.  For some time I could not cross the street, then I broke through and almost ran down the deserted stretch of the Canal.  I arrived almost breathless at the door in the English Prospect.  There I found Sacha watching the people and listening to the distant bands.

“Sacha!” I cried, “is Alexei Petrovitch at home?”

“No, Barin,” she answered, looking at me in some surprise.  “He went out about a quarter of an hour ago.”

“And Nicholas Markovitch?”

“He went out just now.”

“Did he tell you where he was going?”

“No, Barin, but I heard Alexei Petrovitch tell him, an hour back, that he was going to Katerinhof.”

I did not listen to more.  I turned and went.  Katerinhof was a park, ten minutes distant from my island; it was so called because there was there the wooden palace of Katherine the Great.  She had once made it her place of summer residence, but it was now given over to the people and was, during the spring and summer, used by them as a kind of fair and pleasure-garden.  The place had always been to me romantic and melancholy, with the old faded wooden palace, the deserted ponds, and the desolate trees.  I had never been there in the summer.  I don’t know with what idea I hurried there.  I can only say that I had no choice but to go, and that I went as though I were still continuing my dream of the morning.

Great numbers of people were hurrying there also.  The road was thronged, and many of them sang as they went.