"But soon.—Soon!"
He was gone; but, though she yielded to her impulse and ran to the window to look after him, he walked away without once turning his head.
That night, when he returned alone to his empty house, after bidding his world good-bye at the Petersburg station, he perceived at once that the Moscow around him was but a wilderness, and his great palace a prison. Thenceforward he was to exist only in the consciousness of waiting: his faith in her promise that she would torture him not a moment longer than she must. But, as the days passed, logic, calm, even reason, forsook him, till no lover of twenty-one was ever in sorer plight than he. Truly Nathalie herself could hardly have guessed the depths to which she had plunged this quiet and self-centred man. She had, nevertheless, the consideration to keep her word. It was but eleven days after her departure, nine after the funeral of her husband, before Ivan found himself shut alone into that room where she had first greeted him, holding her answer in his visibly trembling hands.—A moment.—A long sigh.—It was open.
"78 Kerzonskaia, St. Petersburg,
"Tuesday, January 9th, 11 P.M.
"Dear Cousin:—Since our last talk together in far-away Moscow, the consciousness of you and of your question have been always with me. To-night I have been sitting here, alone in my boudoir, for two hours, trying, desperately, to think. I have wished to give myself fair opportunity for finding out my real mind; but, miserable thing that I am! the real I will not respond.
"Ivan, my husband has been buried a week and a day! True, for years my tie to him was bondage. I have, to-night, a far tenderer feeling for you than I can remember ever having felt for him. Yet, in spite of this, I cannot bid you hope. I am widowed; and the first numbness of the unexpected shock has not left me yet. I can say to you truly, cousin, that I love you: that the comradeship we have known is something which I shall try to continue while we both live: though we are far beyond our twenties now, Ivan. But more than this, more than pure friendship, seems to me impossible. Marriage—even though it be with the love of my girlhood—is still half-terrible to me. I think that certain memories of my existence with Alexis can never be wiped away.
"Am I cruel, dear Ivan? Oh, I so want not to be! But, indeed, I think I am not yet wholly myself. So I bid you remember that I have suffered very cruelly from the 'love' of a man; and I pray you, for that reason, to try to forgive me when I tell you that friendship is all I can ever want now: that as a friend I shall write you; and as a friend you must know,
"Your affectionate, sorrowful,
"Nathalie D. F."
There are men, perhaps, who would have read hope into this letter and have clung to it, willy-nilly. Ivan was not of these. Self-deception was never a vice of his; and, from this hour, the soul of Nathalie Féodoreff stood revealed to him more clearly than to herself.