‘And so I wanted to see you for one minute, to tell you that you must consider yourself absolutely free, that everything that happened yesterday ought not to affect your plans....’
‘Irina!’ cried Litvinov, ‘why are you saying this?’ He uttered these words in a loud voice. There was the note in them of unbounded passion. Irina involuntarily closed her eyes for a minute.
‘Oh, my sweet one!’ she went on in a whisper still more subdued, but with unrestrained emotion, ‘you don’t know how I love you, but yesterday I only paid my debt, I made up for the past.... Ah! I could not give you back my youth, as I would, but I have laid no obligations on you, I have exacted no promise of any sort of you, my sweet! Do what you will, you are free as air, you are bound in no way, understand that, understand that!’
‘But I can’t live without you, Irina,’ Litvinov interrupted, in a whisper now; ‘I am yours for ever and always, since yesterday.... I can only breathe at your feet....’
He stooped down all in a tremble to kiss her hands. Irina gazed at his bent head.
‘Then let me say,’ she said, ‘that I too am ready for anything, that I too will consider no one, and nothing. As you decide, so it shall be. I, too, am for ever yours ... yours.’
Some one tapped warily at the door. Irina stooped, whispered once more, ‘Yours ... good-bye!’ Litvinov felt her breath on his hair, the touch of her lips. When he stood up, she was no longer in the room, but her dress was rustling in the corridor, and from the distance came the voice of Ratmirov: ‘Eh bien? Vous ne venez pas?’
Litvinov sat down on a high chest, and hid his face. A feminine fragrance, fresh and delicate, clung about him.... Irina had held his hand in her hands. ‘It’s too much, too much,’ was his thought. The little girl came into the room, and smiling again in response to his agitated glance, said:
‘Kindly come, now——’