Once or twice I addressed a remark to Kamarowsky, but he scarcely answered me and I felt myself flushing and paling with humiliation.
Silence fell upon us at last. Painful and embarrassing as I felt it to be, I yet could find no word to say. A violent headache racked my temples, and I had to bite my lips to keep myself from bursting into tears.
Suddenly I got up and went into my room. With trembling hand I sought in my dressing-case for a bottle of cocaine, which for nearly a year I had not touched. I lifted it to my lips and sipped the exhilarating poison. Then I returned to the table.
Kamarowsky was sitting grim and silent with bent head and lowering brow, but the young stranger raised his golden eyes under their long fair lashes, and fixed them upon me as if to give me comfort. After a few moments, in order to break the well-nigh unbearable silence, he spoke to me in his low and gentle voice.
“I hear that Delphinus, the famous crystal gazer, has arrived in Orel. You ought to get him to tell you your fortune.”
“Is that so?” I said, smiling; and even as I spoke the prediction of that strange soothsayer flashed into my memory. I seemed to hear again the brief, prophetic words: “Two men are yet to enter into your life. One will be your salvation—the other your ruin.”
Two men! I glanced around me, startled and amazed. Two men were here; one on each side of me. Was the prophecy coming true? Were these the two men he had spoken of? Were the One and the Other sitting beside me now?
In my mind I could still hear the fortune-teller's nasal, dreamy accent:
“You will chose—the Other. It is your destiny.”
Overcome by a feeling of timorous superstition, I looked at my two table companions, of whom One, perhaps, might represent my destruction, the Other my last hope of happiness.