Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VII).djvu/254

Rh their clasped hands, but his hands were dead already.

'He is passing,' murmured Tatyana, who stood in the doorway, and she began crossing herself.

The sobbing gasps grew briefer, fewer. He still sought Marianna with his eyes but a sort of menacing, glassy whiteness was overspreading them.

'Good ' was his last word.

He was no more and the linked hands of Solomin and Marianna still lay on his breast.

This was what he had written in the two short letters he left. One was addressed to Silin, and consisted of only a few lines:

'Good-bye, brother, friend, good-bye! By the time you get this scrap of paper, I shall be dead. Don't ask how and why, and don't grieve; believe that I'm better off now. Take our immortal Pushkin and read the description of the death of Lensky in Yevgeny Onyegin. Do you remember?—" The windows are white-washed; the mistress has gone." That's all. It's no good my talking to you because I should have too much to say, and there's no time to say it. But I could not go away without telling you; or you would have thought of me as living still, and I should be