In the northern parts of Siberia, in summer time, it seems as if the night would never come. At midsummer, it is almost true to say that there is no night--nothing but a veil of sapphire twilight, which lasts three or four hours. It was a month past midsummer when Felix drove to play tennis and dine at the Governor's house; but even then the dark was long in coming, and Vronsky did not expect his darling home until midnight. There was no moon that night; but the sky was cloudless, and the North burnt as if with the glow of a furnace hidden just below the horizon. Out on the Steppe, between Savlinsky and the Forest of Nicolashof, there stood, some quarter of a mile from the road, and hidden from view by one of those undulations of the ground too low to be called hills, a Kirgiz yourtar, or tent. From a distance these yourtars look more like haystacks than anything else--round, fat haystacks, bound together by strips of hide. The material of which they are really made is thick, warm felt; and they afford a most efficient protection from cold and wet. By the door, all that afternoon, sat three men, in the dress of Kirgiz peasants--long linen shirts, such as one may imagine Abraham to have worn as he sat in his tent door. The woman also, in her long white robe, with a white handkerchief bound round her head, going to and fro with her waterpails to a pond at a short distance, was very like a figure from the Old Testament. From a hillock on the way to the pond she could just see a glimpse of the white highroad, her own head not being a conspicuous object upon the landscape, and all the rest of her being hidden from view by intervening swells of ground. From an hour before mid-day until an hour or so after, her avocations seemed to necessitate almost constant passing to and fro for water. Soon after half-past one a carriage shot past upon the quiet road. The woman at once reported this unusual event to her male companions. She added the information that the tarantasse contained Felix only, and that Vronsky was not with him. The statement was evidently of interest to one of the men, whose features did not seem to be of the true Kirgiz type, and who was smoking a pipe that suggested Western civilization. He consulted in low tones with the two other men. They seemed to come to some arrangement, and then fell silent. The long afternoon hours passed away, and they sat on like graven images. About five o'clock the woman again grew restless, and remained long at her coign of vantage, watching the road. But nothing stirred upon its empty expanse. After a while the woman brought supper, and they ate in silence, while the children, unwashed, untended, crept inside to sleep. It was about nine o'clock when a solitary figure appeared over the top of the low hillock which protected the yourtar from view of the road.