He makes her a profound bow, then turns and leaves the room.
"Until you see me stifling in the mire, like poor Franz Meineck, console yourself with the conviction that you have done your duty by me."
Strange how deeply these words are impressed upon Katrine's soul! She does not sleep during the night following upon the captain's explanation, no, not for a quarter of an hour.
She tosses about restlessly in bed; a moonbeam which has contrived to slip through a crack in her shutters points at her with uncanny persistency, like an accusing ghostly finger. The little clock on her writing-table strikes twelve; the sixth of January is past, the seventh of January has begun. The seventh of January! It was her wedding-day. On the seventh of January nine years before, without a spark of love for Jack Leskjewitsch, but with the angry memory of humiliation suffered at another's hands, she had donned her gown of bridal white and her bridal wreath had been placed upon her head. In her inmost soul she had compared her bridal robes to a shroud, and so cold, so white, so stern, had she looked on that day that those who helped to dress her for the sacred ceremony had often said later that they had seemed to themselves to be preparing a corpse for burial, while all who witnessed the marriage declared that no funeral could have been sadder.
She had first known Jack on her father's, the Freiherr von Rinsky's, estate in M----. Quartered at the castle, Jack had soon ingratiated himself with its gouty old master. Katrine did not dislike him,--nay, she rather liked him. Her pride, which had been suffering from the destruction of her illusions ever since the winter she had spent with her aunt in Pesth three years before, turned with a bitterness that bordered on disgust from all the homage paid her by men. Jack Leskjewitsch had always been attentive to her without ever making love to her,--which attracted her. When he asked her to marry him he did it in so dry, odd a way that from sheer surprise she did not at once say no.
She replied that she would take his offer into consideration. Living beneath the same roof with a young stepmother whom she did not like, and who ruled her father, the suit of a wealthy, thoroughly honourable man was not to be lightly rejected. Yet if he had wooed her passionately and tenderly she would surely have refused to listen to him. This, however, he did not do.