The next day he met her again unexpectedly on the Boulevard de Courcelles. She wore the same simple dress in which he had seen her the first time at the concert, and walked very quickly without looking to the right or the left, like some one who has a significant aim and a fixed time before her.
A little child, frightened by a large dog, slipped and fell down on the sidewalk, crying loudly. Nikolai wished to pick it up. Nita was before him. She picked up the child and asked if she had hurt herself. She had only scratched her hands and chin a little, but she was very dirty. She soiled Nita's dress while she leaned close up to her in her four-year-old sobbing, childish fear. But Nita did not seem to notice that, or, at least, to pay any attention to it, and calmed her with all kinds of caressing talk. Then she wiped the child's face with her handkerchief, kissed her, and finally she took one of her hands, red with cold, in hers, and quite unembarrassed, pursued her way with the poorly dressed little thing to a cake-shop.
There she seated the child at a table. The child drank chocolate from a large, thick cup which she had to hold with both hands; then she set down the cup with a sigh of deep satisfaction, and consumed a cake with the thoughtful slowness of a child unaccustomed to the enjoyment of such luxuries, who seeks to prolong it as long as possible, while Nita looks at her pleasantly, nothing less than sentimental.
Nikolai's heart beat loud. He left his post as listener from fear that she would discover him at his lover's watch. For he was in love, that he now knew himself; he no longer denied it, for he knew better; he knew very well that the girl with the pale face and the brilliant eyes held the happiness of his life in her hands, that great, warm happiness for which his care-laden youth longed in vain.
IX.
There is a great uneasiness in the ladies' studio in the Avenue Frochot. In spite of its being merely the beginning of December, already many of the students have begun to think of the great yearly exhibition of sending to the Salon.
Nita's sanctum has not caught the fever of acute striving for effect in the adjoining room.
Sophie still paints with the same conscientious industry and touching lack of skill at a skull, and Nita--Nita is quite sunk in the study of a new model, over which she is unusually enthusiastic. The model is none other than the brown-curled child whose acquaintance she recently made on the sidewalk when Nikolai watched her. Just now she has gone to look at the different attempts in the adjoining school, when she hears a short scream, and a rattling, banging noise in her room.
"Pardon me, ladies," says she, while she turns her head and listens; "if I am not mistaken something has come to grief in my room, probably my little Lucca della Robbia. What is it?" says she, opening the door of her studio. A memorable sight meets her eyes then. In the middle of the studio, her little hands clutching her temples with horror, stands a young girl with the face of Ribera's Maria Egyptiaca, and stares down at a skull which, broken in two pieces, lies at her feet.
"It is only my Cousin Mascha, who is afraid of the skull; she even threw it on the floor," says Sophie, in her wonderfully phlegmatic manner, and with that she stoops down for the pieces to fit them together and put them in their place again.