"Oh, see! here's one who understands and rejoices at what you have said. Ugh!" With convulsive energy, nay, almost furiously, he grasped and shook Osadchi's hand. "To hell with all these weak, cowardly, squeamish wretches! Out with the sabre and hew them down!" His bloodshot eyes sought an object suitable as a vent for his flaming rage. His naturally cruel instincts had at this moment thrown off their mask. Like a madman he slashed at the oak-copse with his naked sword. Mutilated branches and young leaves rained down on the tablecloth and guests. "Lieutenant Biek! Madman! Are you out of your mind?" screamed the ladies. Biek-Agamalov pulled himself together and returned to his place, visibly much ashamed of his barbaric behaviour; but his delicate nostrils rose and fell with his quick breathings, and his black eyes, wild with suppressed rage, looked loweringly and defiantly at the company. Romashov had heard, and yet not heard, Osadchi's speech. He felt, as it were, stupefied by a narcotic, but celestially delightful, intoxicating drink, and he thought that a warm spider, as soft as velvet, had been spinning softly and cautiously round him with its web, and gently tickled his body till he almost died of an inward, exultant laughter. His hand lightly brushed--and each time as though unintentionally--Shurochka's arm, but neither she nor he attempted to look at each other. Romashov was quite lost in the land of dreams, when the sound of Biek-Agamalov's and Osadchi's voices reached him, but as though they came from a distant, fantastic mist. The actual words he could understand, but they seemed to him empty and devoid of any intelligent meaning. "Osadchi is a cruel man and he does not like me," thought Romashov. "Osadchi's wife is a creature to be pitied--small, thin, and every year in an interesting condition. He never takes her out with him. Last year a young soldier in Osadchi's company hanged himself--Osadchi? Who is this Osadchi? See now, Biek, too, is shrieking and making a row. What sort of a man is he? Do I know him? Ah, of course I know him, and yet he is so strange to me, so wonderful and incomprehensible. But who are you who are sitting beside me?--from whom such joy and happiness beam that I am intoxicated with this happiness. There sits Nikoläiev opposite me. He looks displeased, and sits there in silence all the time. He glances here as if accidentally, and his eyes glide over me with cold contempt. He is, methinks, much embittered. Well, I have no objection--may he have his revenge! Oh, my delicious happiness!" It began to grow dark. The lilac shadows of the trees stole slowly over the plain. The youngest Miss Michin suddenly called out-- "Gentlemen, where are the violets? Here on this very spot they are said to grow in profusion. Come, let us find some and gather them." "It's too late," some one objected. "It's impossible to see them in the grass now."