"I am widowed."
"You are free!"
Their words were uttered almost simultaneously. Then followed a silence, pregnant, surcharged; on Ivan's part almost unpermissible. The Princess Féodoreff lifted one hand to her brow and let it fall again. Ivan turned and began rapidly to pace the room. The thing was so utterly unexpected, so entirely the one event that he had felt could never come about, that he was as one dumb. The woman, watching him, dulled though her mind was by the shock, divined, instinctively, something of his state of thought. Woman though she was, however, she was unprepared for his first action, which, as it were, threw a search-light upon the sole idea into which the confusion eventually resolved itself.
Ceasing his walk he went swiftly to her, took her two hands, drew them protectively to his breast, and said, huskily: "You are in great trouble, Nathalie.—You are unhappy.—Is it—tell me!—is it grief for him?"
Before the clearness of his look, her own went down. A faint color crept into her cheeks. For one moment she hesitated; but finally rose to his own height of honesty.
"No, Ivan, I cannot grieve for the man who deliberately wrecked my youth, debased my thoughts, lowered me for years in my own eyes.—Do you expect it?—It seems to me that, just now, I am feeling nothing. But I know already that I am going to suffer.—I shall suffer remorse! I, who have been so proud of my long forbearance, shall suffer for these last weeks as if I had left him years ago, without provocation!—He is dead; and I was not with him at the end.—He died in his bed.—They tell me it was his heart. He had had trouble with it before, and they had warned him against dissipation; for he was an old man.—But he heeded no one.—And he asked for me, at the end, and I was not there!—That is what I shall suffer for. After all those long years of enduring, I left him to die alone.—Alone: my husband!"
"Nathalie!"
The Princess started at the note of agony in Ivan's voice.
"Nathalie! You are not to suffer for that brute:—that brute who drove you here—drove you to me!" Still retaining the two hands, which she had not tried to make him relinquish, he suddenly sank upon one knee before her, so bringing his head nearly on a level with her own. Then, oblivious of all things else, he began to pour out his heart to her: "Nathalie, that first time, years ago, that you came to Moscow—the time of my mother's death, I forgot my heart-break over her, in you. Even then I loved you, utterly. You were the angel of all my wretched cadet days. Then, years later, when I came to know you a little, my love became the passion of a young man, and it finally swept me into a gulf of desolation. But no wrong could really come through you; and what then seemed ruin, showed itself, in the end, the opportunity of my life. It drove me to what I could not have done alone. Through you I found my work.
"That is long ago, Nathalie; and I am not a young man now. But in all my life there has been only one woman.—That fact came to me forcibly in that first hour of your first visit to me here: the beginning of our thrice-blessed companionship.