“This I said despite myself. Then I relapsed into sobbing. He looked at me in silence for a while, and his eyes made me shiver.

“ ‘Listen, fair one,’ he replied—and his eyes were burning with more than human lustre. ‘What I am about to say to you is no empty talk. So long as you shall give me happiness you shall be mine; but if ever the day shall come when you have ceased to love me, say nothing, waste not a single word, let there be no constraint between us. You will have but to bend your dark eyebrows, to avert your black eyes, to raise your little finger—and I will restore to you both your love and your liberty. Only, my tempestuous beauty, that day will be the day of my death.’

“At these words I felt my very flesh creep.”

Profound emotion here interrupted Katerina’s speech. Then a new flood of recollections caused her to recover her breath again, and to smile. Indeed, had not, at that moment, her eyes encountered Ordynov’s fixed, ardent gaze, she would have continued her narrative. As it was, she shuddered and tried to speak, but the blood only mantled to her cheeks, and she was fain, as one demented, to bury her face in the pillow. Ordynov too felt profoundly moved. His very blood seemed to be turning to poison, and causing him an agony which was increasing with each successive word from Katerina. He felt filled at once with boundless resentment and with an invincible, yet bootless, passion. Indeed, there were moments when he could even have prayed Katerina to be silent, when he could have thrown himself at her feet and besought her to restore him the bliss of those early sufferings when, as yet, he had known nothing of her; to restore him his first passion, vague, yet pure; to restore him his first tears which, alas! had long since dried. Now that those tears could no longer flow he could feel the blood pouring into his heart at such a rate that he was ceasing to understand what Katerina was saying, and even growing afraid of her. How, in that hour, he cursed his love! He felt as though he were being suffocated—as though it were no longer blood, but a stream of lead, that was trickling through his veins.

“Yet that is not my greatest trouble,” said Katerina as she raised her head again. “No, not that, not that!” she repeated in an altered voice as her face contracted and her eyes shone with a dry glitter. “Not that, not that, not that! One can have but one mother, and I have one no longer, but what does a mother matter, or the curse which she uttered when her last miserable hour had come, or my former life, or my peace of heart, or my chastity, or my seduction, or my bartering away of my soul, or my commission of an eternal sin to gain a single moment’s happiness? No. Though these things have been my ruin, they do not matter. My greatest trouble, and that which most embitters my heart, is to think that I am a slave to my own shame, that I love my infamy, that I hug the memory of my undoing as a blessed recollection. That is my greatest misery—the thought that my heart should be nerveless, that it should be incapable of feeling resentment at its own wickedness.”