‘I know.’
‘That I’m not a Russian, that it won’t be my fate to live in Russia, that you will have to break all your ties with your country, with your people.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘Do you know, too, that I have given myself up to a difficult, thankless cause, that I... that we shall have to expose ourselves not to dangers only, but to privation, humiliation, perhaps——’
‘I know, I know all—I love you——’
‘That you will have to give up all you are accustomed to, that out there alone among strangers, you will be forced perhaps to work——’
She laid her hand on his lips. ‘I love you, my dear one.’
He began hotly kissing her slender, rosy hand. Elena did not draw it away from his lips, and with a kind of childish delight, with smiling curiosity, watched how he covered with kisses, first the palm, then the fingers....
All at once she blushed and hid her face upon his breast.
He lifted her head tenderly and looked steadily into her eyes. ‘Welcome, then, my wife, before God and men!’