I don’t know what came over me but I fell to kissing him, I put my arms round his head; he put his forepaws on my shoulders and began licking my face. “So this is the friend fate has sent me,” I thought, and every time I came back from work during that first hard and gloomy period, first of all, before I went anywhere else, I hurried behind the prison with Sharik leaping before me and whining with joy, held his head in my arms and kissed him again and again, and a sweet and at the same time poignantly bitter feeling wrung my heart. And I remember it was positively pleasant to me to think, as though priding myself on my suffering, that there was only one creature in the world who loved me, who was devoted to me, who was my friend, my one friend⁠—my faithful dog Sharik.