These talks in Matrona Pavlovna’s presence were the pleasantest.  When they were alone it was worse.  Their eyes at once began to say something very different and far more important than what their mouths uttered.  Their lips puckered, and they felt a kind of dread of something that made them part quickly.  These relations continued between Nekhludoff and Katusha during the whole time of his first visit to his aunts’.  They noticed it, and became frightened, and even wrote to Princess Elena Ivanovna, Nekhludoff’s mother.  His aunt, Mary Ivanovna, was afraid Dmitri would form an intimacy with Katusha; but her fears were groundless, for Nekhludoff, himself hardly conscious of it, loved Katusha, loved her as the pure love, and therein lay his safety—­his and hers.  He not only did not feel any desire to possess her, but the very thought of it filled him with horror.  The fears of the more poetical Sophia Ivanovna, that Dmitri, with his thoroughgoing, resolute character, having fallen in love with a girl, might make up his mind to marry her, without considering either her birth or her station, had more ground.

Had Nekhludoff at that time been conscious of his love for Katusha, and especially if he had been told that he could on no account join his life with that of a girl in her position, it might have easily happened that, with his usual straight-forwardness, he would have come to the conclusion that there could be no possible reason for him not to marry any girl whatever, as long as he loved her.  But his aunts did not mention their fears to him; and, when he left, he was still unconscious of his love for Katusha.  He was sure that what he felt for Katusha was only one of the manifestations of the joy of life that filled his whole being, and that this sweet, merry little girl shared this joy with him.  Yet, when he was going away, and Katusha stood with his aunts in the porch, and looked after him, her dark, slightly-squinting eyes filled with tears, he felt, after all, that he was leaving something beautiful, precious, something which would never reoccur.  And he grew very sad.

“Good-bye, Katusha,” he said, looking across Sophia Ivanovna’s cap as he was getting into the trap.  “Thank you for everything.”

“Good-bye, Dmitri Ivanovitch,” she said, with her pleasant, tender voice, keeping back the tears that filled her eyes—­and ran away into the hall, where she could cry in peace.

CHAPTER XIII.

Life in the army.

After that Nekhludoff did not see Katusha for more than three years.  When he saw her again he had just been promoted to the rank of officer and was going to join his regiment.  On the way he came to spend a few days with his aunts, being now a very different young man from the one who had spent the summer with them three years before.  He then had been an honest, unselfish lad, ready to sacrifice