After the theatre, Pani Aneta would not let Zavilovski go home; and all went to drink tea. Hardly had they reached the house, when Pani Bronich began to make reproaches.
“You are an evil man; and if anything happens to Lineta, it will be on your conscience. The child doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep; she only reads you, and reads.”
Pani Aneta added immediately,—
“True! I, too, have cause of complaint: she seized your book, and will not give it to any one for an instant; and when we are angry, do you know what she answers? ‘This is mine! this is mine!’”
And Lineta, though she had not the book in her hands at that moment, pressed them to her bosom, as if to defend something, and said in a low, soft voice,—
“For it is mine, mine!”
Zavilovski looked at her and felt that something had, as it were, thrilled in him. But on returning home late he passed by Pan Stanislav’s windows, in which light was still shining. After the theatre and conversation at the Osnovskis’ he felt a certain turning of the head. Now the sight of those windows brought him to himself; he felt suddenly such a pleasant impression as one experiences on thinking of something very good and very dear. His immense, pure homage for Marynia arose in him with its former power: he was possessed by that kind of mild exaltation in which the desires fall asleep, and a man becomes almost entirely a spirit; and he returned home, muttering passages from the poem “Lilia,” the most full of exaltation of any which he had written in his life yet.
There was light at Pan Stanislav’s because something had happened, which seemed to Marynia that mercy of God expected and hoped for.
In the evening, after tea, she was sitting breaking her head, as usual, over daily accounts, when she put the pencil down on a sudden. After a while she grew pale, but her face became clear; and she said, with a voice slightly changed,—
“Stas!”