She shut herself up alone.
It was evening; every one was tired and went to bed early.
In the morning a maid with a mysterious air handed a note to Darya Pavlovna.
The note had, so she said, arrived the evening before, but late, when all had gone to bed, so that she had not ventured to wake her.
It had not come by post, but had been put in Alexey Yegorytch's hand in Skvoreshniki by some unknown person.
And Alexey Yegorytch had immediately set off and put it into her hands himself and had then returned to Skvoreshniki.
For a long while Darya Pavlovna gazed at the letter with a beating heart, and dared not open it.
She knew from whom it came: the writer was Nikolay Stavrogin.
She read what was written on the envelope:
"To Alexey Yegorytch, to be given secretly to Darya Pavlovna."
Here is the letter word for word, without the slightest correction of the defects in style of a Russian aristocrat who had never mastered the Russian grammar in spite of his European education.
"Dear Darya Pavlovna,—At one time you expressed a wish to be my nurse and made me promise to send for you when I wanted you.
I am going away in two days and shall not come back.
Will you go with me?
"Last year, like Herzen, I was naturalised as a citizen of the canton of Uri, and that nobody knows.
There I've already bought a little house.
I've still twelve thousand roubles left; we'll go and live there for ever.
I don't want to go anywhere else ever.
"It's a very dull place, a narrow valley, the mountains restrict both vision and thought.
It's very gloomy.
I chose the place because there was a little house to be sold.
If you don't like it I'll sell it and buy another in some other place.
"I am not well, but I hope to get rid of hallucinations in that air.
It's physical, and as for the moral you know everything; but do you know all?
"I've told you a great deal of my life, but not all.
Even to you! Not all.
By the way, I repeat that in my conscience I feel myself responsible for my wife's death.
I haven't seen you since then, that's why I repeat it.
I feel guilty about Lizaveta Nikolaevna too; but you know about that; you foretold almost all that.
"Better not come to me.
My asking you to is a horrible meanness.
And why should you bury your life with me?
You are dear to me, and when I was miserable it was good to be beside you; only with you I could speak of myself aloud.
But that proves nothing.
You defined it yourself, 'a nurse'—it's your own expression; why sacrifice so much?
Grasp this, too, that I have no pity for you since I ask you, and no respect for you since I reckon on you.
And yet I ask you and I reckon on you.
In any case I need your answer for I must set off very soon.
In that case I shall go alone.
"I expect nothing of Uri; I am simply going.
I have not chosen a gloomy place on purpose.
I have no ties in Russia—everything is as alien to me there as everywhere.
It's true that I dislike living there more than anywhere; but I can't hate anything even there!
"I've tried my strength everywhere.
You advised me to do this 'that I might learn to know myself.'
As long as I was experimenting for myself and for others it seemed infinite, as it has all my life.
Before your eyes I endured a blow from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage in public.
But to what to apply my strength, that is what I've never seen, and do not see now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland, which I believed in.
I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good, and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too.
But both feelings are always too petty, and are never very strong.