“I cut it.”
“H'm! Never mind, cheer up! It'll be all right soon! I am glad that fellow has gone, you know,—confound him! But I bet anything he'll marry as soon as he arrives at his place.”
“Well, what of that? You are going to marry, too!”
“I! That's quite a different affair! What a funny man you are! Why, if you are fifty, he must be sixty! Well, ta-ta! Glad I met you—can't come in—don't ask me—no time!”
He started off at a run, but turned a minute after and came back.
“What a fool I am!” he cried, “I forgot all about it—he sent you a letter. Here it is. How was it you didn't see him off? Ta-ta!”
Velchaninoff returned home and opened the letter, which was sealed and addressed to himself.
There was not a syllable inside in Pavel Pavlovitch's own hand writing; but he drew out another letter, and knew the writing at once. It was an old, faded, yellow-looking sheet of paper, and the ink was faint and discoloured; the letter was addressed to Velchaninoff, and written ten years before—a couple of months after his departure from T——. He had never received a copy of this one, but another letter, which he well remembered, had evidently been written and sent instead of it; he could tell that by the substance of the faded document in his hand. In this present letter Natalia Vasilievna bade farewell to him for ever (as she had done in the other communication), and informed him that she expected her confinement in a few months. She added, for his consolation, that she would find an opportunity of purveying his child to him in good time, and pointed out that their friendship was now cemented for ever. She begged him to love her no longer, because she could no longer return his love, but authorized him to pay a visit to T—— after a year's absence, in order to see the child. Goodness only knows why she had not sent this letter, but had changed it for another!
Velchaninoff was deadly pale when he read this document; but he imagined Pavel Pavlovitch finding it in the family box of black wood with mother-of-pearl ornamentation and silver mounting, and reading it for the first time!
“I should think he, too, grew as pale as a corpse,” he reflected, catching sight of his own face in the looking-glass. “Perhaps he read it and then closed his eyes and hoped and prayed that when he opened them again the dreadful letter would be nothing but a sheet of white paper once more! Perhaps the poor fellow tried this desperate expedient two or three times before he accepted the truth!”