“What has happened?” he asked himself. “I have killed her lover , yes, killed my wife’s lover. Yes, that was it! And why? How did I come to do it?”⁠—“Because you married her,” answered an inner voice.

“But in what was I to blame?” he asked. “In marrying her without loving her; in deceiving yourself and her.” And he vividly recalled that moment after supper at Prince Vasíli’s, when he spoke those words he had found so difficult to utter: “I love you.” “It all comes from that! Even then I felt it,” he thought. “I felt then that it was not so, that I had no right to do it. And so it turns out.”