He went to a restaurant and had a glass of beer, and then started off on foot for his home in Dialij. As he walked he sang to himself:
“Your voice so languorous and soft——”
He felt no trace of fatigue after his six-mile walk, and as he went to bed he thought that, on the contrary, he would gladly have walked another fifteen miles.
“Not baddish!” he remembered as he fell asleep, and laughed aloud at the recollection.
II
After that Startseff was always meaning to go to the Turkins’ again, but he was kept very busy in the hospital, and for the life of him could not win an hour’s leisure for himself. More than a year of solitude and toil thus went by, until one day a letter in a blue envelope was brought to him from the city.
Madame Turkin had long been a sufferer from headaches, but since Kitty had begun to frighten her every day by threatening to go away to the conservatory her attacks had become more frequent. All the doctors in the city had treated her and now, at last, it was the country doctor’s turn. Madame Turkin wrote him a moving appeal in which she implored him to come, and relieve her sufferings. Startseff went, and after that he began to visit the Turkins often, very often. The fact was, he did help Madame Turkin a little, and she hastened to tell all her guests what a wonderful and unusual physician he was, but it was not Madame Turkin’s headaches that took Startseff to the house.
One evening, on a holiday, when Katherine had finished her long, wearisome exercises on the piano, they all went into the dining-room and had sat there a long time drinking tea while Turkin told some of those funny stories of his. Suddenly a bell rang. Some one had to go to the front door to meet a newly come guest, and Startseff took advantage of the momentary confusion to whisper into Katherine’s ear with intense agitation:
“For heaven’s sake come into the garden with me, I beseech you! Don’t torment me!”
She shrugged her shoulders as if in doubt as to what he wanted of her, but rose, nevertheless, and went out with him.