He began to love me and desired me.
Yes—desired!' said she, getting her overshoe and her boot off at last and starting to take off her stockings.
To remove those long stockings fastened with elastic it was necessary to raise her skirts.
She felt embarrassed and said:
'Don't come in!'
But there was no reply from the other side of the wall.
The steady muttering continued and also a sound of moving.
'He is prostrating himself to the ground, no doubt,' thought she.
'But he won't bow himself out of it.
He is thinking of me just as I am thinking of him.
He is thinking of these feet of mine with the same feeling that I have!' And she pulled off her wet stockings and put her feet up on the bench, pressing them under her.
She sat a while like that with her arms round her knees and looking pensively before her.
'But it is a desert, here in this silence.
No one would ever know....'
She rose, took her stockings over to the stove, and hung them on the damper.
It was a queer damper, and she turned it about, and then, stepping lightly on her bare feet, returned to the bench and sat down there again with her feet up.
There was complete silence on the other side of the partition.
She looked at the tiny watch that hung round her neck.
It was two o'clock.
'Our party should return about three!'
She had not more than an hour before her.
'Well, am I to sit like this all alone?
What nonsense!
I don't want to.
I will call him at once.'
'Father Sergius, Father Sergius!
Sergey Dmitrich!
Prince Kasatsky!'
Beyond the partition all was silent.
'Listen! This is cruel.
I would not call you if it were not necessary.
I am ill.
I don't know what is the matter with me!' she exclaimed in a tone of suffering.
'Oh! Oh!' she groaned, falling back on the bench.
And strange to say she really felt that her strength was failing, that she was becoming faint, that everything in her ached, and that she was shivering with fever.
'Listen! Help me!
I don't know what is the matter with me.
Oh!
Oh!'
She unfastened her dress, exposing her breast, and lifted her arms, bare to the elbow.
'Oh! Oh!'
All this time he stood on the other side of the partition and prayed.
Having finished all the evening prayers, he now stood motionless, his eyes looking at the end of his nose, and mentally repeated with all his soul:
'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me!'
But he had heard everything.
He had heard how the silk rustled when she took off her dress, how she stepped with bare feet on the floor, and had heard how she rubbed her feet with her hand.
He felt his own weakness, and that he might be lost at any moment. That was why he prayed unceasingly.
He felt rather as the hero in the fairy-tale must have felt when he had to go on and on without looking round.
So Sergius heard and felt that danger and destruction were there, hovering above and around him, and that he could only save himself by not looking in that direction for an instant. But suddenly the desire to look seized him.
At the same instant she said: