‘How are you, my darling?’ Olyessia said, embracing me and breathing heavily. ‘Have I kept you waiting too long?... It was so hard to get away at the last.... Fighting with granny all the while.’
‘Isn’t she reconciled yet?’
‘Never! She says to me: “He’ll ruin you.... He’ll play with you at his pleasure and then desert you.... He doesn’t love you at all——”’
‘So that’s what she says about me?’
‘Yes, darling, about you.... But I don’t believe a single word of it all the same....’
‘Does she know everything?’
‘I couldn’t say for sure.... But I believe she knows.... I’ve never spoken to her about it—she guesses. But what’s the good of thinking about that.... Come.’
She plucked a twig of whitethorn with a superb spray of blossom and thrust it into her hair. We walked slowly along the path which showed faintly rosy beneath the evening sun.
The night before I had decided that I would speak out at all costs this evening. But a strange timidity lay like a weight upon my tongue. ‘If I tell Olyessia that I am going away and going to marry her,’ I thought, ‘will she not think that my proposal is only made to soothe the pain of the first wound?... But I’ll begin the moment we reach that maple with the peeled trunk,’ I fixed in my mind. We were already on a level with the maple. Pale with agitation I had begun to draw a deep breath to begin to speak, when my courage suddenly failed, and ended in a nervous painful beating of my heart and a chill on my lips. ‘Twenty-seven is my number,’ I thought a few moments later. ‘I’ll count up to twenty-seven, and then!...’ I began to count to myself, but when I reached twenty-seven I felt that the resolution had not yet matured in me. ‘No,’ I said to myself, ‘I’d better go on counting to sixty ... that will make just a minute, and then without fail, without fail——’
‘What’s the matter with you to-day?’ Olyessia suddenly asked. ‘You’re thinking of something unpleasant. What has happened to you?’