“The thing is quite impossible, however you may look at it. You must admit yourself that it is so!” cried Velchaninoff. Both men had risen from their chairs in the excitement of the conversation.
“Not at all—not at all; it is quite possible, sir. In the first place, I merely propose to introduce you as my friend; and in the second place, you know the family already, the Zachlebnikoff's—State Councillor Zachlebnikoff!”
“What? how so?” cried Velchaninoff. This was the very man whom he had so often tried to find at home, and whom he never succeeded in hunting down—the very lawyer who had acted for his adversary in the late legal proceedings.
“Why, certainly—certainly!” cried Pavel Pavlovitch, apparently taking heart at Velchaninoff's extreme display of amazement. “The very same man whom I saw you talking to in the street one day; when I watched you from the other side of the road, I was waiting my turn to speak to him then. We served in the same department twelve years since. I had no thought of all this that day I saw you with him; the whole idea is quite new and sudden—only a week old.”
“But—excuse me; why, surely this is a most respectable family, isn't it?” asked Velchaninoff, naïvely.
“Well, and what if it is respectable?” said Pavel, with a twist.
“Oh, no—of course, I meant nothing; but, so far as I could judge from what I saw, there——”
“They remember—they remember your coming down,” cried Pavel delightedly. “I told them all sorts of flattering things about you.”
“But, look here, how are you to marry within three months of your late wife's death?”
“Oh! the wedding needn't be at once. The wedding can come off in nine or ten months, so that I shall have been in mourning exactly a year. Believe me, my dear sir, it's all most charming—first place, Fedosie Petrovitch has known me since I was a child; he knew my late wife; he knows how much income I have; he knows all about my little private capital, and all about my new increase of salary. So that you see the whole thing is a mere matter of weights and scales.”