Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume XI).djvu/360

Rh not revolting, of bearing a blow from any one whatever even the dearest hand! But it seems one can, if one loves. While I I imagined '

I had grown much older during the last month; and my love, with all its transports and sufferings, struck me myself as something small and childish and pitiful beside this other unimagined something, which I could hardly fully grasp, and which frightened me like an unknown, beautiful, but menacing face, which one strives in vain to make out clearly in the half-darkness.

A strange and fearful dream came to me that same night. I dreamed I went into a low dark room. My father was standing with a whip in his hand, stamping with anger; in the corner crouched Zinaïda, and not on her arm, but on her forehead, was a stripe of red while behind them both towered Byelovzorov, covered with blood; he opened his white lips, and wrathfully threatened my father.

Two months later, I entered the university; and within six months my father died of a stroke in Petersburg, where he had just moved with my mother and me. A few days before his death he received a letter from Moscow which threw him into a violent agitation. He went to my mother to beg some favour of