The lanterns burn red and sleepily in the transparent pale gray of the summer half light, and the buttons of the sentinel shine dully; all other light is extinguished in the world, but up in heaven the stars slowly open their golden eyes. What is there down here to-day for them to look at?
A thunder-storm threatens, but one does not see it as yet, but only hears its hollow voice growling in the distance.
Slowly the brother and sister wander along the narrow way between the old-fashioned, regularly laid-out flower-beds. The stony faces of satyrs and fauns grin down upon them with triumphant cynicism. One can still see their small eyes, slanting upward toward the temples, distinctly in the dull, shadowless, clear twilight. The air is sultry and close, and quite immoderately impregnated with the sad, penetrating perfume of weary flowers which have been tormented by an over-hot summer day.
"Do you remember the last time that we walked around here together?" remarked Sergei, at length breaking the silence.
"Yes," says Natalie. "It was the year before our father's death. I was not much older than Maschenka, and you had not completed your studies."
"Quite right, I did not yet feel myself obliged to be ambitious, in order to help raise our family from its sunken condition," said Sergei very bitterly. "Father had taken me with him during my vacation, in order to cultivate my æsthetic taste. Only think, Natalie, at that time I wrote a poem on the Sistine Madonna! I! that is very laughable, is it not?"
"You--a poem," says Natalie, astonished, and still absently; the affair has in reality little interest for her.
"Yes, I--a poem!" repeats Sergei. "I--now at that time I was an idealist, however improbable that may seem to you! Now, now I am a machine, who still sometimes dreams of having been a man!" He laughs harshly and forcedly, and is suddenly silent. After a while he begins again: "Just look at the roses, Natascha," and he points to the slender bushes which are almost broken under their weight of dried blossoms. "Have you ever seen such an Ash Wednesday? Early this morning they were still fresh! It is a pitiless summer."
Natalie lowers her head. "Now it is coming," she thinks. "Now it is coming." But no, not what she has expected, but something different, comes.
"Did it ever occur to you," continues Sergei after a little while, "how very much a tree struck by lightning resembles one killed by frost? In the end it all tends in the same direction." He is silent. After a while he says, looking her straight in the eyes: "Did you understand me?"