“Reasonable?” she said, more calmly. “I am reasonable enough—at least for my age. And if you only reflect you will admit that I have some small reason to ask what I do—some infinitesimal right, as a friend, if you prefer it so.”
“Oh yes—she too has rights!” flashed keenly through his mind. “And better ones than any other human being, if she but knew it.” “Certainly,” he said aloud, “you have all possible rights as my friend—as any of my friends have—to know what concerns me; but there is nothing—nothing worth telling, I assure you.”
“Nothing?” she exclaimed. “When you are as dull as ditch-water—when you seem as blue as—” Her eyes went to the transparent vaulting scarcely veiling the sky, as if searching for a fitting comparison, and he grasped at his last chance of repairing his previous mistake.
“I am blue, and a little sad; perhaps you are right.” He hesitated. “Just as any one else would be who contemplates a certain change in existing circumstances.”
She was looking at him steadily, unswervingly, waitingly.
“When I told you a little while ago that I didn’t know as yet exactly where I would spend the summer, I was speaking the truth. As a matter of fact, I do not know yet exactly where, but it will be somewhere in Russia, probably at Tverna, and just ... on account of this indecision on my part I was afraid you’d laugh at me as you so often do!”
“The Russian conception of what is laughable differs by the whole span of heaven from mine,” she said, with suspicious quietness. “The point of interest is, however, whether you are going there a-Maying in the mud, or ... whether ... well, whether you will be gone long.... I mean after the Maying and the summering are both done with.”
Reassured by her deceiving calm, he thought himself clever to seize the moment when truth might be quite truthfully conveyed.
“That depends upon so many circumstances,” he explained. “It is impossible to be precise, but I should say ... yes, I should certainly say that it may take ... er ... a year, or even more, to bring matters requiring my presence at home to a satisfactory conclusion.”
Her pitiful little face had slowly whitened as he spoke, and suddenly he felt her fingers desperately clutching his arm.