As Clara walked back to her lodging alone the streets of the strange town gave her an excruciating sense of desolation.
CHAPTER XLI.
PAVEL BECOMES “ILLEGAL.”
A MONTH had elapsed. Clara was in a train, bound for Moscow, where her lover was awaiting her arrival. The nearer she drew to her destination the more vivid grew his features in her mind and the more violent was her fidget. “I am madly in love with him,” she said to herself, and the very sound of these words in her mind were sweet to her. The few weeks of separation seemed to have convinced her that the power of his love over her was far greater than she had supposed. Things that had preyed upon her mind before now glanced off her imagination. She wept over the fate of Hessia and her prison-born child, yet she felt that if Pavel asked her to marry him at once she would not have the strength to resist him. Nay, to marry him was what her heart coveted above all else in the world.
Being an “illegal,” she had to slip into the big ancient city quietly. As she passed through the streets, alone on a droshky, she made a mental note of the difference in general pictorial effect between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but she was too excited to give her mind to anything in particular.
Her first meeting with Pavel took place in a large café, built something like a theatre, with two tiers of stalls, a gigantic music box sending up great waves of subdued sound from the main floor below. He waited for her in front of the building. When she came they just shook hands smilingly, and he led the way up one flight of stairs to one of the stalls—a fair-sized, oblong private room, its walls covered with red plush, with upholstered benching to match.
“I am simply crazy, Clanya!” he whispered, pressing her to him tremulously.
At first they both experienced a sense of desuetude and awkwardness, so that in spite of his stormy demonstrations he could not look her full in the face. But this soon wore off. They were overflowing with joy in one another.