“Yes, in Vassilitzi’s dressing-room; the servant will take you up,” he answered abstractedly, and as I moved towards the wide old-fashioned bell-pull by the stove, he turned and strode after me.
“Wait one moment!” he said hurriedly. “Are you still determined to go through with us? There is still time to turn back, or rather to go back to England. It would not be easy perhaps, but it would be quite possible for you to get through, via Warsaw and Alexandrovo, if you go at once.”
“Why do you ask me that?” I demanded, looking at him very straight. His blue eyes were more troubled than I had ever seen them. “Do you doubt me?”
“No, before God I trust you as I trust none other in the world but Mishka and his father! But you are a stranger, a foreigner; why should you throw your life away for us?”
“I have told you why, before. Because I only value my life so far as it may be of service to—her. If I left her and you, now, as you suggest, smuggled myself back into safety,—man, it’s not to be thought of!”
“Well, I will urge you no more,” he said sadly. “But you are sacrificing yourself for a chivalrous delusion, my friend.”
“Where’s the delusion? I know she does not love me; and I am quite content.”
Long after, I knew what he had wished to tell me then, and I can’t even now decide what I’d have done if he had spoken, whether I would have gone or stayed; but I think I’d have stayed!
When I had bathed and dressed in Vassilitzi’s dressing-room,—he was still in bed and asleep in the adjoining one,—a servant took me to Anne’s boudoir, a small bare room that yet had a cosey homelike look about it.