"Yes, Ivan. I am too unhappy. I must—I have got to stop thinking about you.—It is too hard, too miserable, the other way.—And I know they will never let you see me again."
Ivan's reply was a tightening of his clasp on her hands. Then he bent his head, while his brows were knitted, anxiously. It seemed as if he could not speak. And she had opened her lips to comfort him a little when he burst forth, huskily:
"Nathalie, I love you better than life! Will you marry me?"
"Oh!—Ivan!" The child trembled. She would have drawn away, but that he held her tightly and strove to look into her face. Then, suddenly, she grew braver, and let her eyes meet his. In the rose-red of her fair face he read, ecstatically, his answer. But he was to have yet more. Unknowing that he had read her thought, she found her voice and whispered: "Yes!"
And then, in a second, he had kissed her, upon the mouth, there in the dusk of the little, empty chapel. Whereafter, indeed, she would have torn herself from him, had he not drawn her arm through his, and started forward, saying, in her ear:
"Come, my dear! We are betrothed. You belong to me, henceforth. And we are in a church. Let us go and see if they will marry us, here, now.—I believe God gave you to me just now for this very thing. And—"
But Ivan had at last got beyond her courage. It was a daring thing he had proposed; and he had not paused to reflect that, considering the laws of their stern faith, so hasty an affair would be impossible. Perhaps, then, Ivan had some right to be bitterly disappointed at her vehement protests. How could he understand that, even with her, the signs and formalities, the insignia and paraphernalia of a fashionable marriage, even more than marriage itself, form, in the mind of a young girl, the grand aim, centre, end, even, of all life. And he was asking her to forget all these!—Preposterous—love him though she did! No. They were engaged. That she allowed. And was not that enough for one day?—Ivan could not gainsay her.—Well, then, let him come at once to her father. And perhaps on the morrow—the wonderful morrow—the court journal would make formal announcement of their betrothal, and she would be that most interesting (?) of feminine creatures, a girl engaged!
Thus she talked: thus dreamed. And Ivan, in a little paradise of his own, was drawn, in spite of himself, into her spirit of enthusiasm. He promised to go, that very evening, to his uncle. And so, at length, he left her, half a block from the Dravikine house, and went his way towards his apartment, already beginning on the fourth year of his married life.
It was half-past eight o'clock that evening when Lieutenant Gregoriev, shivering with something more than cold, stood at the door of the Dravikine house. When it opened, he was informed at once that Monsieur le Comte was at home; and the impenetrable butler, bursting with interest, showed him solemnly to the library, on the threshold of which stood Ivan's shadowy fate, black-robed. For five minutes the Lieutenant waited, his heart in his mouth, his dry tongue vainly trying to repeat that careful little speech, the original of which he had unfortunately left on the bureau of his room in his own apartment.