We kept silent for some time. In the distance the smoke of a steamboat rose up on the Rhine; we followed it with our eyes.
"And your story," she said to me in a low voice.
"Why did you sometimes begin to laugh when you saw me?" I asked her.
"I don't know. Sometimes I feel like weeping, and I begin to laugh. You must not judge of me by the way I act. Apropos, what is that legend about the fairy Lorelei? This is her rock that one sees here. They say that formerly she drowned everybody, until, falling in love, she threw herself into the Rhine. I like the story. Dame Louise knows a great many of them; she tells them all to me. Dame Louise has a black cat with yellow eyes."
Annouchka raised her head and shook her curls.
"Ah! how happy I am," she said. At that moment low, monotonous sounds began to be heard at intervals,—hundreds of voices, chanting in chorus, with cadenced interruptions, a religious song. A long procession appeared on the road below us, with crosses and banners.
"Suppose we join them," Annouchka said to me, listening to the chants that came to us growing fainter and fainter by degrees.
"You are then very religious?"
"One should go to some place very far away for devotion, or to accomplish a perilous work!" she added. "Otherwise the days slip by—life passes uselessly."
"You are ambitious," I said to her. "You do not wish to end your life without leaving behind some traces of your existence?"