"What's the matter? You are ill?" he said to her in French,
going up to her. He would have run to her, but remembering that
there might be spectators, he looked round towards the balcony
door, and reddened a little, as he always reddened, feeling that
he had to be afraid and be on his guard.
"No, I'm quite well," she said, getting up and pressing his
outstretched hand tightly. "I did not expect...thee."
"Mercy! what cold hands!" he said.
"You startled me," she said. "I'm alone, and expecting
Seryozha; he's out for a walk; they'll come in from this side."
But, in spite of her efforts to be calm, her lips were quivering.
"Forgive me for coming, but I couldn't pass the day without
seeing you," he went on, speaking French, as he always did to
avoid using the stiff Russian plural form, so impossibly frigid
between them, and the dangerously intimate singular.
"Forgive you? I'm so glad!"
"But you're ill or worried," he went on, not letting go her hands
and bending over her. "What were you thinking of?"
"Always the same thing," she said, with a smile.
She spoke the truth. If ever at any moment she had been asked
what she was thinking of, she could have answered truly: of the
same thing, of her happiness and her unhappiness. She was
thinking, just when he came upon her, of this: why was it, she
wondered, that to others, to Betsy (she knew of her secret
connection with Tushkevitch) it was all easy, while to her it was
such torture? Today this thought gained special poignancy from
certain other considerations. She asked him about the races. He
answered her questions, and, seeing that she was agitated, trying
to calm her, he began telling her in the simplest tone the
details of his preparations for the races.
"Tell him or not tell him?" she thought, looking into his quiet,
affectionate eyes. "He is so happy, so absorbed in his races
that he won't understand as he ought, he won't understand all the
gravity of this fact to us."
"But you haven't told me what you were thinking of when I came
in," he said, interrupting his narrative; "please tell me!"
She did not answer, and, bending her head a little, she looked
inquiringly at him from under her brows, her eyes shining under
their long lashes. Her hand shook as it played with a leaf she
had picked. He saw it, and his face expressed that utter
subjection, that slavish devotion, which had done so much to win
her.