of yourself! That sort of thing becomes you well,
you know. Why not do it? And don't call me 'Aglaya'; you have done it
several times lately. You are bound, it is your DUTY to 'raise' her; you
must go off somewhere again to soothe and pacify her. Why, you love her,
you know!"

"I cannot sacrifice myself so, though I admit I did wish to do so once.
Who knows, perhaps I still wish to! But I know for CERTAIN, that if she
married me it would be her ruin; I know this and therefore I leave her
alone. I ought to go to see her today; now I shall probably not go. She
is proud, she would never forgive me the nature of the love I bear her,
and we should both be ruined. This may be unnatural, I don't know; but
everything seems unnatural. You say she loves me, as if this were LOVE!
As if she could love ME, after what I have been through! No, no, it is
not love."

"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.

"It IS true, it IS true," cried Aglaya, almost beside herself with rage.

"What's true? What's all this? What's true?" said an alarm