“Then what has happened?”

“It has happened.”

She shuddered, and clung to Ordynov as a child might do.

“Listen,” she went on as suddenly she ceased to weep. “I had a good reason for not wishing to be alone there. . . . Do not grieve any more; do not weep for the misfortunes of others. Keep your tears for your own days of sorrow, when you will be lonely and unhappy, when you will have no one to comfort you. . . . Listen. Have you a sweetheart?”

“No. You are my first.”

“I? Do you call me your sweetheart?”

Her face expressed the most profound surprise. She was just about to speak again when suddenly she checked herself, and lowered her eyes. Presently she blushed, and her eyes took on a brilliant glitter through the tears which were fringing her lashes. With a mien that was half-playful, half-diffident, she shot a single swift glance at Ordynov, and then looked down upon the floor again.

“No, I shall never be your first sweetheart,” she said. “No, no!” she repeated thoughtfully, a smile just parting her lips. “No, no!” she said again—this time breaking into frank laughter. “It is not I, my dear one, who will ever be your beloved.”

But when she raised her eyes again it was clear that her brief access of gaiety had changed to a despair so profound—a despair that was so entirely a prey to agitation—that immense pity (the sort of unreasoning pity which is excited in the breast only by unknown misfortunes) seized upon Ordynov, and he looked at Katerina with inexpressible pain.

“Listen to me,” she said as she took the young man’s hands and forcibly checked her sobs. “Listen to me; listen carefully, my dear one. You must keep a watch over your heart. Love me if you will, but in another way than that, so that you may spare yourself many misfortunes, and escape making a terrible enemy, and have a sister in place of a sweetheart. But I will always come and see you if you wish, and caress you, and never regret that I have known you. Do you understand? Never during the whole two days of your illness have I left you. Take me, then, for your sister. It was not for nothing that I called you ‘brother’ just now; it was not for nothing that I have been tearfully interceding for you with the Virgin. Never will you find such a sister as I could be. Ah! A sweetheart? Is it a sweetheart that your soul craves for? I tell you that you might search the whole world over, yet never find a sweetheart like myself. I would love you to the end, even as I love you now, and I would love you because your soul is pure and transparent, and because from the first moment that I saw you I knew that you must one day come and lodge in this house, and be its welcome guest. So you see I had a reason for inviting you to enter when you first came. Yes, I should always be fond of you because, whenever your eyes look into mine, I can see that they are charged with love, and that they voice your heart. Yes, your eyes never speak but at once I know all that is passing in your breast. That is why, in return for your love, I would yield you my life and my liberty; for it is sweet even to be the slave of the man who has one’s heart in his keeping. Yet alas! my life is no longer my own, and my cherished liberty is fled from me. Take me, then, for your sister, and be to me as a brother. Let me lie close to your heart when fresh troubles and sicknesses shall come upon you; leave it in my power to visit you without shame and without regret—to pass a whole night with you even as I am doing now. . . . Do you hear? Will you open your heart to me as a sister? Do you understand all that I have just said?”