A terrible excitement seized Eugene as he rode home. "What will happen? What is a peasant woman like? Suppose it turns out that she is hideous, horrible. No, she is handsome," he told himself, remembering some he had been noticing. "But what shall I say? What shall I do?"
He was not himself all that day. Next day at noon he went to the forester's hut. Daniel stood at the door and silently and significantly nodded towards the wood. The blood rushed to Eugene's heart, he was conscious of it and went to the kitchen-garden. No one was there. He went to the bath-house—there was no one about, he looked in, came out, and suddenly heard the crackling of a breaking twig. He looked round—and she was standing in the thicket beyond the little ravine. He rushed there across the ravine. There were nettles in it which he had not noticed. They stung him and, losing the pince-nez from his nose, he ran up the slope on the farther side. In a white embroidered apron, in a red-brown skirt and a bright red kerchief, barefoot, fresh, firm, and handsome, she stood shyly smiling.
"There is a path leading round,—you should have gone round," she said. "I came long ago, ever so long."
He went up to her and, looking her over, touched her.
A quarter of an hour later they separated; he found his pince-nez, called in to see Daniel, and in reply to his question: "Are you satisfied, master?" gave him a ruble and went home.
He was satisfied. Only at first had he felt ashamed, then it had passed off. And it had all gone well. The best thing was that he now felt at ease, tranquil and vigorous. As for her, he had not even seen her thoroughly. He remembered that she was clean, fresh, not bad-looking, and simple, without any pretence. "Whose wife is she?" said he to himself. "Pechnikov's, Daniel said. What Pechnikov is that? There are two households of that name. Probably she is old Michael's daughter-in-law. Yes, that must be it. His son does live in Moscow. I'll ask Daniel about it some time."
From then onward that previously important drawback to country life—enforced self-restraint—was eliminated. Eugene's freedom of mind was no longer disturbed and he was able to attend freely to his affairs.
And the matter Eugene had undertaken was far from easy: it sometimes seemed to him that he would not be able to go through with it, and that it would end in his having to sell the estate after all, so that all his efforts would be wasted and it would turn out that he had failed, and been unable to accomplish what he had undertaken. That prospect disturbed him most of all. Before he had time to stop up one hole a new one would unexpectedly show itself.
All this time more and more debts of his father's, which he had not expected, came to light. It was evident that his father had latterly borrowed right and left. At the time of the settlement in May, Eugene had thought he at last knew everything, but suddenly, in the middle of the summer, he received a letter from which it appeared that there was still a debt of 12,000 rubles to the widow Esipova. There was no promissory note, but only an ordinary receipt, which his lawyer told him could be disputed. But it did not enter Eugene's head to refuse to pay a debt of his father's merely because the document could be challenged. He only wanted to know for certain whether there had been such a debt.
"Mamma! Who is Kaleriya Vladimirovna Esipova?" he asked his mother, when they met as usual for dinner.