“You did not!  But why?”

“I don’t know.  Other thoughts came into my head,” he answered.  He seemed to me to be watching himself inwardly, as though he were trying to count his own heart-beats, while his eyes never for a moment left the face of the girl.  “You were not there,” he continued.  “I had made up my mind never to see you again.”

This seemed to take her breath away for a moment.

“You....  How is it possible?”

“You may well ask....  However, I think that I refrained from telling your mother from prudence.  I might have assured her that in the last conversation he held as a free man he mentioned you both....”

“That last conversation was with you,” she struck in her deep, moving voice.  “Some day you must....”

“It was with me.  Of you he said that you had trustful eyes.  And why I have not been able to forget that phrase I don’t know.  It meant that there is in you no guile, no deception, no falsehood, no suspicion—­nothing in your heart that could give you a conception of a living, acting, speaking lie, if ever it came in your way.  That you are a predestined victim....  Ha! what a devilish suggestion!”

The convulsive, uncontrolled tone of the last words disclosed the precarious hold he had over himself.  He was like a man defying his own dizziness in high places and tottering suddenly on the very edge of the precipice.  Miss Haldin pressed her hand to her breast.  The dropped black veil lay on the floor between them.  Her movement steadied him.  He looked intently on that hand till it descended slowly, and then raised again his eyes to her face.  But he did not give her time to speak.

“No?  You don’t understand?  Very well.”  He had recovered his calm by a miracle of will.  “So you talked with Sophia Antonovna?”

“Yes.  Sophia Antonovna told me....”  Miss Haldin stopped, wonder growing in her wide eyes.

“H’m.  That’s the respectable enemy,” he muttered, as though he were alone.

“The tone of her references to you was extremely friendly,” remarked Miss Haldin, after waiting for a while.

“Is that your impression?  And she the most intelligent of the lot, too.  Things then are going as well as possible.  Everything conspires to...Ah! these conspirators,” he said slowly, with an accent of scorn; “they would get hold of you in no time!  You know, Natalia Victorovna, I have the greatest difficulty in saving myself from the superstition of an active Providence.  It’s irresistible....  The alternative, of course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors.  But, if so, he has overdone it altogether—­the old Father of Lies—­our national patron—­our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad.  He has overdone it.  It seems that I am not simple enough....  That’s it!  I ought to have known....  And I did know it,” he added in a tone of poignant distress which overcame my astonishment.