Until now Vera had been accustomed to guard her own secrets, and to exercise an undivided rule in the world of her thoughts. If she had given her confidence to the priest’s wife, it was out of charity. She had confided to her the calendar of her everyday life, its events, its emotions and impressions; she had told her of her secret meetings with Mark, but concealed from her the catastrophe, telling her simply that all was over between them. As the priest’s wife was ignorant of the dénouement of the story at the foot of the precipice, she put down Vera’s illness to grief at their parting.
Vera loved Marfinka as she loved Natalie Ivanovna, not as a comrade, but as a child. In more peaceful times she would again confide the details of her life to Natalie Ivanovna as before; but in a crisis she went to Tatiana Markovna, sent for Tushin, or sought help from her cousin Boris.
Now she put the letters in her pocket, found her aunt, and sat down beside her.
“What has happened, Vera? You are upset.”
“Not upset, but worried. I have received letters, from there.”
“From there!” repeated Tatiana Markovna, turning pale.
“The first was written some time ago, but I have only just opened it, and the second was brought to me to-day,” she said, laying them both on the table.
“You want me to know what is in them?”
“Read them, Grandmother.”
Tatiana Markovna put on her glasses, and tried to read them, but she found that she could not decipher them, and eventually Vera had to read them. She read in a whisper, suppressing a phrase here and there; then she crumpled them up and put them back in her pocket.