Marina mingled among the crowd of maidens, lay down upon her back,
closed her dreamy eyes, and joined in the festive chorus. The
maidens' souls became absorbed in the singing, and their song spread
far and wide through all the shadowy recesses of the woods, like
shining rays of sunlight. Their eyes closed in langour, their full-
blooded bodies ached with a delicious sensation. Their hearts seemed
to grow benumbed, the numbness spreading through their blood to their
limbs; it deprived them of strength, and their thoughts became
chaotic.
Marina stretched her limbs sensuously; then became absorbed in the
singing, and she also sang. She felt strangely inert; only quivering
at the sound of the lusty, excited voices of the youths.
Afterwards she lay on a couch in her suffocatingly close room; her
hands were clasped behind her head; her bosom swelled. She stretched,
opened her dark pensive eyes wide, compressed her lips, then sank
again into the drowsy langour, lying thus for many hours.
She was twenty, and had grown up free and solitary--with the hunters,
the woods, and the steep and the river--from her birth.
IV
Demid lived on his own plot of ground, which, like the village, stood
on a hill above the river. But here the hill was higher and steeper,
sweeping the edge of the horizon. The wood was nearer, and its grey-
trunked cedars and pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake
their crests to the stars and stretch their dark-green forest hands
right up to the house.
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