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‘Why, you’ve not come into possession of the property, have you?’ queried Baburin.

‘No, I haven’t,’ I answered.

‘Well, then, it follows …’ Baburin did not finish his sentence; but I mentally finished it for him: ‘it follows that I’m a boy.’

‘Good-bye,’ I said aloud, and I retired.

I was just going out of the courtyard into the street … Musa suddenly ran out of the house, and slipping a piece of crumpled paper into my hand, disappeared at once. At the first lamp-post I unfolded the paper. It turned out to be a note. With difficulty I deciphered the pale pencil-marks. ‘For God’s sake,’ Musa had written, ‘come to-morrow after matins to the Alexandrovsky garden near the Kutafia tower I shall wait for you don’t refuse me don’t make me miserable I simply must see you.’ There were no mistakes in spelling in this note, but neither was there any punctuation. I returned home in perplexity.

* * * * *

When, a quarter of an hour before the appointed time, next day, I began to get near the Kutafia tower (it was early in April, the buds were swelling, the grass was growing greener, and the sparrows were noisily chirrupping and quarrelling in the bare lilac bushes), considerably to my surprise, I caught sight of Musa a little to one side, not far from the fence. She was there before me. I was going towards her; but she herself came to meet me.

‘Let’s go to the Kreml wall,’ she whispered in a hurried voice, running her downcast eyes over the ground; ‘there are people here.’

We went along the path up the hill.

‘Musa Pavlovna,’ I was beginning…. But she cut me short at once.

‘Please,’ she began, speaking in the same jerky and subdued voice, ‘don’t criticise me, don’t think any harm of me. I wrote a letter to you, I made an appointment to meet you, because … I was afraid…. It seemed to me yesterday,–you seemed to be laughing all the time. Listen,’ she added, with sudden energy, and she stopped short and turned towards me: ‘listen; if you tell with whom … if you mention at whose room you met me, I’ll throw myself in the water, I’ll drown myself, I’ll make an end of myself!’

At this point, for the first time, she glanced at me with the inquisitive, piercing look I had seen before.

‘Why, she, perhaps, really … would do it,’ was my thought.

‘Really, Musa Pavlovna,’ I protested, hurriedly: ‘how can you have such a bad opinion of me? Do you suppose I am capable of betraying my friend and injuring you? Besides, come to that, there’s nothing in your relations, as far as I’m aware, deserving of censure…. For goodness’ sake, be calm.’

Musa heard me out, without stirring from the spot, or looking at me again.

‘There’s something else I ought to tell you,’ she began, moving forward again along the path, ‘or else you may think I’m quite mad! I ought to tell you, that old man wants to marry me!’

‘What old man? The bald one? Punin?’

‘No–not he! The other … Paramon Semyonitch.’

‘Baburin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it possible? Has he made you an offer?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t consent, of course?’

‘Yes, I did consent … because I didn’t understand what I was about then. Now it’s a different matter.’

I flung up my hands. ‘Baburin–and you! Why, he must be fifty!’

‘He says forty-three. But that makes no difference. If he were five–and–twenty I wouldn’t marry him. Much happiness I should find in it! A whole week will go by without his smiling once! Paramon Semyonitch is my benefactor, I am deeply indebted to him; he took care of me, educated me; I should have been utterly lost but for him; I’m bound to look on him as a father…. But be his wife! I’d rather die! I’d rather be in my coffin!’