Nikolai would like to have taken tickets for the whole thing; but the pence he had about him were only enough for the garden.
The row of lamps lighted up the snowy road to a crowded restaurant, from the first floor windows of which came the shrieks of a woman's soprano, followed every now and then by a storm of applause. Farther on, a roundabout, crammed with people, was going round under an illuminated roof to the accompaniment of shrill music.
On both sides was a moving and, as regards the male portion, very miscellaneous and mixed crowd of fair-frequenters.
He searched the garden through, but in the darker paths outside the principal one, only a few loitering, shivering figures were to be seen, who seemed hovering like longing moths about the light.
It was down in that building, from which came sounds of music, the one to which all the people streamed and stood in a dense crowd outside, that the ball was going on.
All the blood in him seemed suddenly to stand still, and he approached slowly and hesitatingly, his face grey with apprehension.
He stood outside for a long time, gazing in at the large, lighted windows. Dark shadows passed behind the blinds, an unceasing variety of heads and shoulders.
There where the blind was pulled a little to one side he saw the round-headed Gunda again; the back of her head was so near him that he would have liked to push the pane in and ask her where Silla was?
He felt the shaking of the floor and the music twice as much where he was standing; it was as if the whole ball had got into his head.
Now he caught a glimpse of a sloping shoulder and half a back in an overcoat, with a cane sticking out of the owner's pocket—and part of a fashionable hat-brim.