Thus months dragged along, and then something happened which entirely transformed her life. One day, when she was at work upon a quilt, she suddenly experienced a strange sensation. No⁠—it seemed impossible. Motionless she sat with her work in hand. Was it possible that this was It . Forgetting everything, his baseness and deceit, her mother’s querulousness, and her father’s sorrow, she smiled. She shuddered at the recollection that she was on the point of killing it, together with herself.

She now directed all her thoughts to getting away⁠—somewhere where she could bear her child⁠—and become a miserable, pitiful mother, but a mother withal. Somehow she planned and arranged it all, leaving her home and settling in a distant provincial town, where no one could find her, and where she thought she would be far from her people. But, unfortunately, her father’s brother received an appointment there, a thing she could not possibly foresee. For four months she had been living in the house of a midwife⁠—one Maria Ivanovna; and, on learning that her uncle had come to the town, she was preparing to fly to a still remoter hiding-place.