Tanya, a seventeen-year-old village girl with a simple, pretty face and gray peasant eyes, serves as a maid at the small landowner Kazakova. At times, her relative Peter came running to the landowner. At first, he almost does not notice Tanya.

In that distant time, he spent himself especially recklessly, led a wandering life, had many random love encounters and connections - and how he reacted to the accidental and the connection with her ...

One fall, Peter calls on Kazakova on the way from the Crimea to Moscow. For the first time he really notices Tanya when a girl covers his bed.

Waking up at night, Peter leaves the house through the back canopy, where the door of the maid’s room opens. The door is ajar, a man notices Tanya sleeping on the bed “in one shirt and in a paper skirt” with her legs bare to the knees, and approaches her. Peter kisses her hot cheek, she does not respond, and he takes it for consent. There is intimacy between them.

Having woken up, Tanya for a long time cannot believe what happened to her, and Petra for a long time does not believe that Tanya really slept.

She ... cried for several days, but every day she was more and more convinced that it was not grief that happened, but happiness, that he was becoming sweeter and dearer to her.

The next proximity occurs between them when Peter takes Tanya from the station - Kazakova sent the girl to the city for shopping. After that, Tanya was completely reconciled with her position, and in the moments of closeness, which happen more and more often, calls him Petrusha. He, too, is becoming increasingly attached to the girl who gave him such unexpected happiness.

They meet furtively - Tanya is afraid that the old maid will find out about everything and will glorify her in the whole village.

Peter constantly postpones his departure. Tanya knows that he remains with Kazakova only because of her, and gradually becomes more confident. One day they spend most of the night together. Peter tells Tanya that he is going to leave - he has business in Moscow, but he will definitely come by Christmas. He does not want to take her with him, justifying himself by living in rooms and not having been born for family life at all.

Two days later, Peter leaves.

And the house and the whole estate were empty, they died. And to imagine Moscow and him in it, his life there, his business, there was no way.

At Christmas, he does not appear. For some reason, Tanya eagerly believes that Peter will come to Epiphany, and the whole holiday goes “in his best outfit - in that dress and in those boots that he met her then in the fall, at the station, that unforgettable evening.” But Peter is still gone. In the evening, Tanya tells herself that everything is over, he will never come, and she has nothing to wait for.

Peter arrives in February - by then Tanya had lost all hope of seeing him. He is amazed to see how she lost weight and faded.He also seems to her "aged, alien, and even unpleasant." However, gradually everything is back in track.

On the eve of his next departure, Tanya tells Peter that he no longer loves her and only "killed for nothing."

Again, these warm children's tears on a child’s hot face ... She does not even suspect all the strength of my love for her!

She understands how much has changed, but he begins to warmly console her, promising that he will certainly come and spend the whole summer with her. Tanya gradually calms down and again begins to believe in his love.

Tanya does not know that he sees him for the last time - "it was in February of the terrible seventeenth year."