“And what if I do?” replied Aratoff, affectionately.

This very affection also did not please Platonida Ivanovna.  Aratoff wore the aspect of a man who has learned a great secret, which is very agreeable to him, and is jealously clinging to it and reserving it for himself.  He was waiting for night, not exactly with impatience but with curiosity.

“What comes next?” he asked himself;—­“what will happen?” He had ceased to be surprised, to be perplexed; he cherished no doubt as to his having entered into communication with Clara; that they loved each other ... he did not doubt, either.  Only ... what can come of such a love?—­He recalled that kiss ... and a wondrous chill coursed swiftly and sweetly through all his limbs.—­“Romeo and Juliet did not exchange such a kiss as that!” he thought.  “But the next time I shall hold out better....  I shall possess her....  She will come with the garland of tiny roses in her black curls....

“But after that what?  For we cannot live together, can we?  Consequently I must die in order to be with her?  Was not that what she came for,—­and is it not in that way she wishes to take me?

“Well, and what of that?  If I must die, I must.  Death does not terrify me in the least now.  For it cannot annihilate me, can it?  On the contrary, only thus and there shall I be happy ... as I have never been happy in my lifetime, as she has never been in hers....  For we are both unsullied!—­Oh, that kiss!”

* * * * *

Platonida Ivanovna kept entering Aratoff’s room; she did not worry him with questions, she merely took a look at him, whispered, sighed, and went out again.—­But now he refused his dinner also....  Things were getting quite too bad.  The old woman went off to her friend, the medical man of the police-district, in whom she had faith simply because he did not drink and was married to a German woman.  Aratoff was astonished when she brought the man to him; but Platonida Ivanovna began so insistently to entreat her Yashenka to permit Paramon Paramonitch (that was the medical man’s name) to examine him—­come, now, just for her sake!—­that Aratoff consented.  Paramon Paramonitch felt his pulse, looked at his tongue, interrogated him after a fashion, and finally announced that it was indispensably necessary to “auscultate” him.  Aratoff was in such a submissive frame of mind that he consented to this also.  The doctor delicately laid bare his breast, delicately tapped it, listened, smiled, prescribed some drops and a potion, but chief of all, advised him to be quiet, and refrain from violent emotions.

“You don’t say so!” thought Aratoff....  “Well, brother, thou hast bethought thyself too late!”

“What ails Yasha?” asked Platonida Ivanovna, as she handed Paramon Paramonitch a three-ruble bank-note on the threshold.  The district doctor, who, like all contemporary doctors,—­especially those of them who wear a uniform,—­was fond of showing off his learned terminology, informed her that her nephew had all the dioptric symptoms of nervous cardialgia, and that febris was present also.