"They say truly," she began, "that people's hearts are full of
contradictions. Your example ought to frighten me, to make me distrust
marriage for love; but I--"

"You have refused him?" interrupted Lavretsky.

"No; but I have not consented either. I told him everything, everything
I felt, and asked him to wait a little. Are you pleased with me?" she
added with a swift smile--and with a light touch of her hand on the
banister she ran down the stairs.

"What shall I play to you?" she asked, opening the piano.

"What you like," answered Lavretsky as he sat down so that he could look
at her.

Lisa began to play, and for a long while she did not lift her eyes from
her fingers. She glanced at last at Lavretsky, and stopped short; his
face seemed strange and beautiful to her.

"What is the matter with you?" she asked.

"Nothing," he replied; "I'm very happy; I'm glad of you, I'm glad to see
you--go on."

"It seems to me," said Lisa a few moments later, "that if he had really
loved me, he would not have written that letter; he must have felt that
I could not give him an answer now."

"That is of no consequence," observed Lavretsky, "what is important is
that you don't love him."

"Stop, how can we talk like this? I keep thinking of you dead wife, and
you frighten me."

"Don't you think, Voldemar, that Liseta plays charmingly?" Marya
Dmitrievna was saying at that moment to Panshin.

"Yes," answered Panshin, "very charmingly."

Marya Dmitrievna looked tenderly at her young partner, but the latter
assumed a still more important and care-worn air and called fourteen
kings.

Chapter XXXI

Lavretsky was not a young man; he could not long delude himself as to
the nature of the feeling inspired in him by Lisa; he was brought on
that day to the final conviction that he loved her. This conviction did
not give him ay great pleasure. "Have I really nothing better to do,"
he thought, "at thirty-five than to put my soul into a woman's keeping
again? But Lisa is not like her; she would not demand degrading
sacrifices from me: she would not tempt me away from my duties; she
would herself incite me to hard honest work, and we would walk hand in
hand towards a noble aim. Yes," he concluded his reflections, "that's
all very fine, but the worst of it is that she does not in the least
wish to walk hand in hand with me. She meant it when she said that
I frightened her. But she doesn't love Panshin either--a poor
conso