fixedly into the darkness; a secret
smile parted her lips, seen by none, but she quickly shook her head,
and clasped her hands behind her neck, and again her former thought hung
like a mist about her. Before morning she undressed and went to bed,
but she could not sleep. The first fiery ray of sunlight fell upon her
room... 'Oh, if he loves me!' she cried suddenly, and unabashed by the
light shining on her, she opened wide her arms... She got up, dressed,
and went down. No one in the house was awake yet. She went into the
garden, but in the garden it was peaceful, green, and fresh; the birds
chirped so confidingly, and the flowers peeped out so gaily that she
could not bear it. 'Oh!' she thought, 'if it is true, no blade of grass
is happy as I. But is it true?' She went back to her room and, to kill
time, she began changing her dress. But everything slipped out of her
hands, and she was still sitting half-dressed before her looking-glass
when she was summoned to morning tea. She went down; her mother noticed
her pallor, but only said: 'How interesting you are to-day,' and taking
her in in a glance, she added: 'How well that dress suits you; you
should always put it on when you want to make an impression on any one.'
Elena made no reply, and sat down in a corner. Meanwhile it struck nine
o'clock; there were only two haurs now till eleven. Elena tried to read,
then to sew, then to read again, then she vowed to herself to walk a
hundred times up and down one alley, and paced it a hundred times; then
for a long time she watched Anna Vassilyevna laying out the cards for
patience... and looked at the clock; it was not yet ten. Shubin came
into the drawing-room. She tried to talk to him, and begged his pardon,
what for she did not know herself.... Every word she uttered did not
cost her effort exactly, but roused a kind of amazement in herself.
Shubin bent over her. She expected ridicule, raised her eyes, and saw
before her a sorrowful and sympathetic face.... She smiled at this face.
Shubin, too, smiled at her without speaking, and gently left her. She
tried to keep him, but could not at once remember what to call him. At
last it struck eleven. Then she began to wait, to wait, and to listen.
She could do nothing now; she ceased even to think. Her heart was
stirred into life again, and began beating louder and louder, and
strange, to say, the time seemed flying by. A quarter of an hour passed,
then half an hour; a few minutes mo