Again and again a strong hope awakened in him that he might strangle and crush the gentle blossom of his delicious love. Several days had already passed without his visiting the Rameyevs. He did not even come on those days on which they grew accustomed to expect him. Elisaveta thought this a deliberate incivility, and it hurt her feelings. But whenever Piotr abused him she defended him. Her imagination began to evoke more and more frequently the features of his face: his deep, observing glance; his proud, ironic smile; his pale face, clean-shaven like an actor’s, and cold like a mask. How sweetly and how bitterly she was in love with him--her sweet vision betrayed itself in the gleam in her eyes. Rameyev had grown fond of Trirodov, and he missed his presence. He found it a pleasant diversion to chat with Trirodov, and even to wrangle with him sometimes. He made two calls at Trirodov’s house, and did not find him in. Rameyev wrote several invitations. He received courteous but evasive replies expressing regret at not being able to come. One evening Rameyev growled at Piotr: “He stopped coming because of your rudeness.” Piotr replied sharply: “Let him stay away. I’m very glad.” Rameyev looked at him sternly, and said: “But I’m not glad. There’s one interesting man in this wilderness, and we frighten him away.” Piotr excused himself. He felt uneasy. He walked out of the house alone, aimlessly, wishing only to escape his own relatives. The sunset blazed for a long time, tormented itself with its unwillingness to die; it lingered on as if it were its last day, and at last expired. The whole sky became blue--exquisitely blue. But to the north-west an edge of it was translucently green. The quiet stars trembled in the blue heights. The moon, which had looked for some time a pale white in the luminous clearness, now rose yellow and distinct. Almost total darkness covered the earth. There was a coolness along the bank of the river--after the hot day. There was an odour of a forest fire, and it, too, softened its unpleasant, malignant bitterness in the dark evening coolness. A green-haired, green-eyed water-nymph bathed near the low, dark dam; she splashed about in the water, which struck the obstruction with a brittle sound, and in rhythmic response to it the stream laughed most sonorously. Piotr walked quietly upon the path along the river-bank, and thought of Elisaveta sadly and languorously--or rather, he recalled her--evoked her in vision--involuntarily yielded himself to the melancholy play of the nervous fantasies of his brain. The peaceful silence of the evening, so much at one with him, said to him without words, yet comprehensibly, that the pitch of his soul was too quiet, too feeble for Elisaveta, who was so strong, so erect, and so simple.