“Elise,” I whispered to her one evening, “I am afraid, I am terribly afraid of him.”
“Shall I tell some one about it? Shall I tell Monsieur the Count?” exclaimed Elise.
“No, no,” I cried.
“Might I—might I tell Monsieur Naumoff?”
I hesitated; but when I recalled those golden eyes that turned to me filled with such trust and adoration I shook my head. “No, tell no one, Elise, tell no one.” And I hid my face in the pillows.
At last a day came when I was able to be up for an hour, and it was no longer possible to prevent Kamarowsky from coming to see me. Prilukoff refused to go away; I could not get him to stir from my room. At last, having compelled me to repeat the abominable vow, having forced me to invoke once more the seraphic image of little Tioka as tutelar genius of a monstrous crime, he went away, passing through my dressing-room to an outer passage at the back of the hotel.
Elise dressed me and placed me in an armchair near the window, where I reclined, trembling and weak. Then I sent word to Count Kamarowsky that I would see him.
He came in full of emotion and joy. “At last, at last you are better,” he cried, his kind eyes alight with pleasure. “But how pale you are, how dreadfully pale.” And bending over me, he kissed my hair with infinite tenderness.
As I saw him standing before me, smiling and well, the murderous ravings of Prilukoff and my own iniquitous vow seemed but a figment of my morbid fancy, a half-forgotten illusion of my delirium, dissolving and fading away like a dark dream at daylight.
Kamarowsky held my hand tightly clasped in his, as if he were half afraid I might vanish from him. “What a poor little blue-white hand!” he said. “You have become quite transparent, Mura; I think I can look right through you and see your soul, trembling and flickering like a little flame!”