And I admired the dress, only because she liked it, and went on tenderly: "A wonderful, lovely dress! Lovely, wonderful, Masha. My dear Masha!" And tears began to drop on the fashion-plate. "Wonderful Masha...." I murmured. "Dear, darling Masha...." She went and lay down and I sat still for an hour and looked at the illustrations. "You should not have opened the windows," she called from the bedroom. "I'm afraid it will be cold. Look how the wind is blowing in!" I read the miscellany, about the preparation of cheap fish, and the size of the largest diamond in the world. Then I chanced on the picture of the dress she had liked and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, and bare shoulders, a brilliant, dazzling figure, well up in music and painting and literature, and how insignificant and brief my share in her life seemed to be! Our coming together, our marriage, was only an episode, one of many in the life of this lively, highly gifted creature. All the best things in the world, as I have said, were at her service, and she had them for nothing; even ideas and fashionable intellectual movements served her pleasure, a diversion in her existence, and I was only the coachman who drove her from one infatuation to another. Now I was no longer necessary to her; she would fly away and I should be left alone. As if in answer to my thoughts a desperate scream suddenly came from the yard: "Mur-der!" It was a shrill female voice, and exactly as though it were trying to imitate it, the wind also howled dismally in the chimney. Half a minute passed and again it came through the sound of the wind, but as though from the other end of the yard: "Mur-der!" "Misail, did you hear that?" said my wife in a hushed voice. "Did you hear?" She came out of the bedroom in her nightgown, with her hair down, and stood listening and staring out of the dark window. "Somebody is being murdered!" she muttered. "It only wanted that!" I took my gun and went out; it was very dark outside; a violent wind was blowing so that it was hard to stand up. I walked to the gate and listened; the trees were moaning; the wind went whistling through them, and in the garden the idiot's dog was howling. Beyond the gate it was pitch dark; there was not a light on the railway. And just by the wing, where the offices used to be, I suddenly heard a choking cry: "Mur-der!" "Who is there?" I called. Two men were locked in a struggle. One had nearly thrown the other, who was resisting with all his might. And both were breathing heavily. "Let go!" said one of them and I recognised Ivan Cheprakov. It was he who had cried out in a thin, falsetto voice. "Let go, damn you, or I'll bite your hands!" The other man I recognised as Moissey. I parted them and could not resist hitting Moissey in the face twice. He fell down, then got up, and I struck him again.