Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume VI).djvu/186

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VIRGIN SOIL

woman's soul─it would be hard to say; but, in fact, his heart was light, even though he complained─and sincerely─to his friend Silin.

This frame of mind was, however, suddenly and violently destroyed in a single day.

On the morning of that day he received a note from Vassily Nikolaevitch, in which he was directed in conjunction with Markelov, while awaiting further instructions, at once to make friends with and come to an understanding with the aforementioned Solomin, and a certain merchant, Golushkin, an Old Believer, living in S———. This note threw Nezhdanov into violent agitation; he could read reproach for his inactivity in it. The bitterness, that had all this time only raged in words, was stirred up again from the bottom of his heart.

Kallomyetsev came to dinner greatly perturbed and exasperated. 'Imagine,' he cried in a voice almost lachrymose, 'what a horrible thing I have just read in the paper: my friend, my dear Mihail, the Servian prince, has been murdered by some miscreants in Belgrade! This is what these Jacobins and revolutionists come to, if we don't put a firm stop to them!' Sipyagin 'begged leave to remark' that this revolting murder was probably not the work of Jacobins, whose existence can hardly be supposed in Servia,' but of men of the party of

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