“Those were his words?”
“His very words.”
“Mais, il est ridicule. What did she do? She moaned, cried yes and no?”
“She answered, ‘No, Ivan Ivanovich, give me time to consider whether I can respond with the same deep affection that you feel for me. Give me six months, a year, and then I will answer “yes” or “no.”’ Your room is so hot, Paulina Karpovna, could we have a little air?”
Raisky thought he had invented enough, and glanced up at his hostess, who wore an expression of disappointment.
“C’est tout?” she asked.
“Oui,” he said. “In any case Tushin did not abandon hope. On the next day, Marfinka’s birthday, he appeared again to hear her last word. From the precipice he went through the park, and she accompanied him. It seems that next day his hopes revived. Mine are for ever gone.”
“And that is all? People have been spreading God knows what tales about your cousin—and you. They have not even spared that saint Tatiana Markovna with their poisonous tongues. That unendurable Tychkov!”
Raisky pricked up his ears. “They talk about Grandmother?” he asked waveringly.
He remembered the hint Vera had given him of Tatiana Markovna’s love story, and he had heard something from Vassilissa, but what woman has not her romance? They must have dug up some lie or some gossip out of the dust of forty years. He must know what it was in order to stop Tychkov’s mouth.