He blew his nose and was about to leave the room when he spied the girl and stood still.  I, behind the plants, escaped his notice.  He seemed to me to be quivering with excitement.  It must have been his calculations that upset him so.  He rubbed his hands and danced from place to place, and kept getting more and more excited.  Finally, however, he conquered his emotions and came to a standstill.  He cast a determined look at the future bride and wanted to move toward her, but glanced about first.  Then, as if with a guilty conscience, he stepped over to the child on tip-toe, smiling, and bent down and kissed her head.

His coming was so unexpected that she uttered a shriek of alarm.

“What are you doing here, dear child?” he whispered, looking around and pinching her cheek.

“We’re playing.”

“What, with him?” said Julian Mastakovich with a look askance at the governess’s child.  “You should go into the drawing-room, my lad,” he said to him.

The boy remained silent and looked up at the man with wide-open eyes.  Julian Mastakovich glanced round again cautiously and bent down over the girl.

“What have you got, a doll, my dear?”

“Yes, sir.”  The child quailed a little, and her brow wrinkled.

“A doll?  And do you know, my dear, what dolls are made of?”

“No, sir,” she said weakly, and lowered her head.

“Out of rags, my dear.  You, boy, you go back to the drawing-room, to the children,” said Julian Mastakovich looking at the boy sternly.

The two children frowned.  They caught hold of each other and would not part.

“And do you know why they gave you the doll?” asked Julian Mastakovich, dropping his voice lower and lower.

“No.”

“Because you were a good, very good little girl the whole week.”

Saying which, Julian Mastakovich was seized with a paroxysm of agitation.  He looked round and said in a tone faint, almost inaudible with excitement and impatience: 

“If I come to visit your parents will you love me, my dear?”

He tried to kiss the sweet little creature, but the red-haired boy saw that she was on the verge of tears, and he caught her hand and sobbed out loud in sympathy.  That enraged the man.

“Go away!  Go away!  Go back to the other room, to your playmates.”

“I don’t want him to.  I don’t want him to!  You go away!” cried the girl.  “Let him alone!  Let him alone!” She was almost weeping.

There was a sound of footsteps in the doorway.  Julian Mastakovich started and straightened up his respectable body.  The red-haired boy was even more alarmed.  He let go the girl’s hand, sidled along the wall, and escaped through the drawing-room into the dining-room.

Not to attract attention, Julian Mastakovich also made for the dining-room.  He was red as a lobster.  The sight of himself in a mirror seemed to embarrass him.  Presumably he was annoyed at his own ardour and impatience.  Without due respect to his importance and dignity, his calculations had lured and pricked him to the greedy eagerness of a boy, who makes straight for his object—­though this was not as yet an object; it only would be so in five years’ time.  I followed the worthy man into the dining-room, where I witnessed a remarkable play.