Marta with an astonished and frightened face, smiled in a flustered way.
"Well, what do you think now?" said Peredonov maliciously. "You thought I was a fool, but I've come out best. You spoke about the envelope. Well, here's the envelope. No, there's no mistake about it."
He hit the table with his fist, neither violently nor loudly—and his movement and the sound of his words remained somehow strangely distant, as if he were foreign and indifferent to his own affairs.
Vershina and Marta exchanged glances in a perplexed way.
"Why are you looking at each other?" said Peredonov crossly. "There's nothing for you to look at each other about: everything's settled now and I shall marry Varvara. There were a lot of little girls trying to catch me here."
Vershina sent Marta for cigarettes and Marta gladly ran from the summer-house. She felt herself free and light-spirited as she went over the little sandy paths strewn with the bright-coloured autumn leaves. Near the house she met Vladya barefoot—and she felt even gayer and more cheerful.
"He's going to marry Varvara, that's decided," she said happily in a low voice as she drew her brother into the house.
In the meantime Peredonov, without waiting for Marta, abruptly took his leave.
"I have no time," he said, "getting married is not making a pair of lapti."[5]
Vershina did not detain him and said good-bye to him coldly. She was intensely vexed: until now she still had kept the frail hope that she would marry Marta to Peredonov and keep Mourin for herself. And now the last hope had vanished.