other with extraordinary swiftness, the sweet moments of the past and his recent humiliation began to arise in his mind. "Uncover his face," said Anna's voice. He took away his hands, and realized how humiliated and ridiculous he must have appeared.
He still lay there trying to sleep, though he felt that there was not the slightest hope of it, and repeating in a whisper some formula with the design of driving away the new and distressing hallucinations that kept arising. He listened to his own voice repeating, with a strange persistence: "You did not know how to appreciate her, you did not know how to value her; you did not know how to appreciate her, you did not know how to value her."
"What is going to happen to me? Am I going mad?" he asked himself. "Perhaps so. Why do people go mad? and why do they commit suicide?"
And, while he was answering himself, he opened his eyes and was surprised to see at his head a cushion embroidered by Varia, his brother's wife. He lightly touched the tassel of the cushion and tried to fix the thought of Varia in his mind and how she looked the last time he saw her; but any idea foreign to what tormented him was still more intolerable.
"No, I must sleep." He placed the cushion under his head, but it required an effort to keep his eyes closed. He leaped to his feet and sat down. "All is over with me; what else can I do?" And his imagination vividly pictured what life without Anna would be.
"Ambition? Serpukhovskoï? the world? the court?" No more these had power to stop him. All this once had some meaning, but now it had none. He rose from the divan, took off his coat, loosened his necktie and bared his shaggy chest that he might breathe more freely, and began to stride up and down the room.
"This makes people insane," he repeated; "this causes suicide, .... to avoid disgrace," he added slowly.
He went to the door and closed it; then, with a look of determination, and with his teeth set, he went to the table, took his revolver, examined it, turned the loaded chamber round, and stopped to consider. He stood
