"Sure?" His eyes rest penetratingly on her face. Nikolai feels very unpleasantly, but still can no longer be silent.
"I am designated to Washington," stammers he, hastily rushing through the words. "I start to-morrow evening. May I come back in the autumn to--fetch you?"
She starts up. "Me?" cries out she, beside herself. "Me?"
"And who else, then?" he asks, with desperate harshness. "Do you not know that I love you?"
"Me?" she repeats, hesitatingly, and paling.
"Do you then believe that it has seemed to me worth the trouble to look at another girl since I have known you? Oh, love, darling, only one!"
The for years restrained fire of his nature has awakened. Her silence encourages him. He kneels at her feet, draws her hands to his lips. He is no longer the well-bred young diplomat whom Nita had formerly known; he is Lensky's son. More slender, with more finely cut features, his face yet, in the expression, in the kind trace about the mouth, in the violent demand and still tender supplication of his glance, resembles his father's quite mysteriously. It is the same coaxing voice with which Lensky, in his good moods, if he had wished, could have charmed down an angel from heaven; they are the same full, warm lips.
His words she has listened to without moving, but as his lips touch her hands she repulses him with a violent movement.
"Leave me!" she gasps. "Go!"
Dizzily he rises. Such an expression of anxiety, of horror is depicted on her face that his pride is up in arms. "Yet I have said nothing insulting to you," says he, violently, and looks piercingly at her, as if he expected that she would reply something. But as she remains silent, he speaks, with difficulty forcing himself to be calm: "That you refuse my hand is your affair--at heart I was prepared for that; but you shake me off as an impertinent. You extinguish the sun of my life, and do not once tell me that you are sorry for me. Whom, then, have I loved so passionately, so boundlessly? The girl who is capable of such horrible treatment I simply did not know!"