Chapter XXI
Midday. It was quiet, innocent, and fresh in the depth of the wood, at the edge of the hollow--and the outer heat penetrated hither only by an infinite coiling as of a scaly serpent impotent at last and deprived of its poison. Trirodov had found this place for himself and Elisaveta. More than once they came here together--to read, to talk, and to sit a while at the moss-covered stone, out of which, like a strange corporeal ghost, grew up all awry a slender quaking ash. Elisaveta, dressed in her simple short skirt, her long sunburnt arms and part of her legs showing, seemed so tall, so erect, and so graceful at this moss-covered stone. Elisaveta was reading aloud--poems! How golden her voice sounded with its seductive, sun-like sonorousness! Trirodov listened with a slightly ironical smil
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