“Whatever you like,” answered Lavretsky, taking a seat where he could look at her.

Liza began to play, and went on for some time with-out lifting her eyes from her fingers.  At last she looked at Lavretsky, and stopped playing.  The expression of his face seemed so strange and unusual to her.

“What is the, matter?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he replied.  “All is well with me at present.  I feel happy on your account; it makes me glad to look at you—­do go on.”

“I think,” said Liza, a few minutes later, “if he had really loved me he would not have written that letter; he ought to have felt that I could not answer him just now.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Lavretsky; “what does matter is that you do not love him.”

“Stop!  What is that you are saying?  The image of your dead wife is always haunting me, and I feel afraid of you.”

“Doesn’t my Liza play well, Woldemar?” Madame Kalitine was saying at this moment to Panshine.

“Yes,” replied Panshine, “exceedingly well.”

Madame Kalitine looked tenderly at her young partner; but he assumed a still more important and pre-occupied look, and called fourteen kings.

XXIX.

Lavretsky was no longer a very young man.  He could not long delude himself as to the nature of the feeling with which Liza had inspired him.  On that day he became finally convinced that he was in love with her.  That conviction did not give him much pleasure.

“Is it possible,” he thought, “that at five-and-thirty I have nothing else to do than to confide my heart a second time to a woman’s keeping?  But Liza is not like her.  She would not have demanded humiliating sacrifices from me.  She would not have led me astray from my occupations.  She would have inspired me herself with a love for honorable hard work, and we should have gone forward together towards some noble end.  Yes,” he said, bringing his reflections to a close, “all that is very well.  But the worst of it is that she will not go anywhere with me.  It was not for nothing that she told me she was afraid of me.  And as to her not being in love with Panshine—­that is but a poor consolation!”

Lavretsky went to Vasilievskoe; but he could not manage to spend even four days there—­so wearisome did it seem to him.  Moreover, he was tormented by suspense.  The news which M. Jules had communicated required confirmation, and he had not yet received any letters.  He returned to town, and passed the evening at the Kalitines’.  He could easily see that Madame Kalitine had been set against him; but he succeeded in mollifying her a little by losing some fifteen roubles to her at piquet.  He also contrived to get half-an-hour alone with Liza, in spite of her mother having recommended her, only the evening before, not to be too intimate with a man “qui a tin si grand ridicule.”