"Oh, are you ready so soon?" called Natalie, when she saw her husband at the window. "Come to breakfast; I have had the table laid in the garden."
He hurried down. The breakfast-table stood in a shady spot, over which the blooming lindens reached their branches.
Oh, what a table! How very pretty the Rouen service made it! a service whose old-fashioned gayness combined harmoniously the most incongruous colors, set out on the dazzling white damask table-cloth. How inviting and appetizing everything was! These curiously shaped dishes, with their fragrant burden of still warm golden cakes and rolls of pale yellow butter between glittering pieces of ice, and ham covered with transparent aspic! Around the greenish twilight, fragrant, cool, only here and there the reddish glimmer of a sunbeam curiously wandered into the shadow, and now held captive by the lindens.
When she saw her father coming, little Mascha became quite unruly, almost danced out of her mother's arms, and, without resisting, let herself be taken, hugged, and kissed by him. While he held her in his arms, Kolia seized her little bare legs, and pressed his mouth to her tiny pink feet.
"She is charming, a beauty! Is that really my daughter, can something so wonderfully pretty have such an ugly man for father?" he said from time to time, laughingly, tenderly, while he kissed her bare shoulders, and especially the dimple in her neck, again and again.
"She looks very like you, your pretty daughter," jested Natalie. "More than the boy! It vexes him if I say that, and I also would prefer it to be the other way."
Lensky laughed somewhat constrainedly. The nurse came up to get baby.
"Just a moment," said Lensky, swinging the little thing high in the air, to its great delight, "so--and one more kiss on the eyes, the neck, on these dear, sweet little hands, so----"
The nurse already had the little thing in her arms, when the sweet little rogue looked round at her father.
Meanwhile, Natalie busied herself with the samovar, which stood on a small stand near the breakfast table. No servant was near, Kolia helped mamma serve tea, and waited with a sober expression until his mother had confided the cup for his father to him. Carefully, as if he held the Holy Grail in his hands, he carried it over to Lensky. Natalie sat down opposite her husband, and buttered him a piece of bread.