Stubbornly, as though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin, and tearing the leaves and flowers off the lime trees and stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything on one side--acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, and tall tree-tops.

The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into shelter in the servants' quarters.

The streaming rain had already flung its white veil over all the distant forest and half the fields close by, and was rapidly swooping down upon the copse.

The wet of the rain spurting up in tiny drops could be smelt in the air.

Holding his head bent down before him, and struggling with the wind that strove to tear the wraps away from him, Levin was moving up to the copse and had just caught sight of something white behind the oak tree, when there was a sudden flash, the whole earth seemed on fire, and the vault of heaven seemed crashing overhead.