"Ah! you here?" said Natalie. "I thought you had taken French leave. I was vexed with you."
"Yes, because--because I was sorry not to be able to thank you. It was really----"
"Do not speak so," said he, quite roughly; "just as if you did not know that there is nothing in the world, nothing in my power that I would not do for you!"
She bent her head back a little and smiled at him in a friendly way, but as if his words had not surprised her in the slightest. "You are very good to me," said she.
He felt strangely thus alone with her in this sweet-perfumed, melancholy, intoxicating sultriness, alone with this happiness that was so near him, and which he was afraid of frightening away by an unseemly imprudence. He felt by turns hot and cold. Why did she not go?
She rested her hands on the marble balustrade of the loggia and bending over it she murmured: "How beautiful! oh, how wonderfully beautiful! And it is so tiresome in there; do you not find it so, Boris Nikolaivitch?"
His throat contracted, he felt that he was about to lose control of himself.
"Shall I play?" he asked. "I will do it willingly for you."
"Oh, no! Why should you play to those stupid people in there?" replied she. "I would be prepared to hear, in the middle of the G minor concerto, the question: 'Before I forget it, can you not give me the address of a good shoemaker in Rome?' You know how such things vex me."
"Is she coquetting with me, or--?" he asked himself again.
She stood before him with her enchanting face, and her tender glance met his. She did not know that she tormented him. In spite of her twenty-one years, she had the boundless innocence of a girl whose mind has never been desecrated by the knowledge of passion, a degree of innocence in which men do not believe.
"Is she coquetting?" His heart beat to bursting, and suddenly, when she quite unconstrainedly came one step nearer him, he took her hand. "Oh, you dear, dear girl!" he murmured, with hoarse, scarcely audible voice, and pressed it to his lips.
[Illustration: "Oh, you dear, dear girl!" he murmured, with hoarse, scarcely audible voice, and pressed it to his lips.
Crimsoning. She tore away her hand. _p. 61_.]
Crimsoning, she tore away her hand. "For Heaven's sake, what are you thinking of?" said she, and started back with a proud, almost scornful gesture.