Ten minutes later, when he entered the little dining-room where they had served lunch, Natalie's maid announced that he must not wait for her mistress, as she was feeling ill. He hurried to her bedroom. She sat on a sofa, her hands in her lap. Her great eyes stared into the distance, she looked like a corpse.
He sat down by her, drew her on his knee, and overwhelmed her with caresses.
"You are right to be angry, quite right. I was detestable," said he; "but you know what a bear you have for a husband. It is only because I love you so dearly that now, just now, the thing is so inconvenient. Oh, my little dove, my heart!" He pressed the palms of her hands to his lips and stroked her cheeks.
Every vexation melted away in the warmth of his manner. She suddenly began to sob, but not from grief.
"Do you think, then, that I would not have been glad?" he said to her tenderly. "But now, do you see, just now----"
Then he told her the state of affairs. The man in the Havana brown overcoat was the famous impressario Morinsky, with whom Lensky had just made an engagement for a concert tour in the United States. Morinsky had offered him a small fortune. "You know how hard it is for me to part from you," he concluded. "I wished to take you with me--you and the boy, for he can put off school for another year. I thought it was the most favorable moment, and now--it is so stupid, so horribly stupid!"
She had listened very quietly; now she raised her head and said uneasily:
"And now you naturally will have to give up the American project?"
"That is impossible," replied he, turning his face from her, "but I will try--that is, I will put off my departure in any case until the great event is over."
"And then?" She had slipped down from his knee and walked up and down the room uneasily. "And then?" she repeated, while she beat on the floor quite imperiously with the tip of her little foot.