I got up, smiling. “Oh, no, indeed! Now that I have been forewarned—”
“You will choose the other,” he repeated oracularly. “It is your destiny.”
Although I am not really superstitious, this curt, obscure prediction impressed me strangely.
“I shall beware of whom I meet,” I said to myself; and indeed, every time a man spoke to me, even casually, I wondered: could this be the One?—or the Other?
But days and months passed, and I made no new acquaintances.
Prilukoff kept me jealously secluded, and little Tioka absorbed my every hour. Apart from these two I saw no one at all.
It was by mere chance that one day I met a former acquaintance.
I had taken Tioka for a walk in the park when we saw a gentleman and a child sitting on a bench in the shade. They were both dressed in deep mourning, and they looked sad and disconsolate. The little boy was leaning his fair head on his father's arm, watching him as, with an air of melancholy abstraction, he traced hieroglyphics in the gravel with his stick. On hearing us approach the man in mourning raised his head and looked at us.
I recognized him at once. It was Count Paul Kamarowsky, the husband of one of my dearest friends, who lived at Dresden, and whom I had not seen for nearly two years.
He recognized me, too, and started to his feet with eager face, while the little boy looked at us diffidently, still holding to his father's sleeve.