“How pale you have grown!” cried Aglaya in alarm.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I haven’t slept, that’s all, and I’m rather tired. I—we certainly did talk about you, Aglaya.”
“Oh, indeed, it is true then! You could actually talk about me with her; and—and how could you have been fond of me when you had only seen me once?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it was that I seemed to come upon light in the midst of my gloom. I told you the truth when I said I did not know why I thought of you before all others. Of course it was all a sort of dream, a dream amidst the horrors of reality. Afterwards I began to work. I did not intend to come back here for two or three years—”
“Then you came for her sake?” Aglaya’s voice trembled.
“Yes, I came for her sake.”
There was a moment or two of gloomy silence. Aglaya rose from her seat.
“If you say,” she began in shaky tones, “if you say that this woman of yours is mad—at all events I have nothing to do with her insane fancies. Kindly take these three letters, Lef Nicolaievitch, and throw them back to her, from me. And if she dares,” cried Aglaya suddenly, much louder than before, “if she dares so much as write me one word again, tell her I shall tell my father, and that she shall be taken to a lunatic asylum.”
The prince jumped up in alarm at Aglaya’s sudden wrath, and a mist seemed to come before his eyes.
“You cannot really feel like that! You don’t mean what you say. It is not true,” he murmured.