“Well, are you coming into my room?  We will try to cheer you up.”

He excused himself, saying he had to be at home, and began taking leave.  Missy kept his hand longer than usual.

“Remember that what is important to you is important to your friends,” she said.  “Are you coming tomorrow?”

“I hardly expect to,” said Nekhludoff; and feeling ashamed, without knowing whether for her or for himself, he blushed and went away.

“What is it? Comme cela m’intrigue,” said Katerina Alexeevna.  “I must find it out.  I suppose it is some affaire d’amour propre; il est tres susceptible, notre cher Mitia.”

“Plutot une affaire d’amour sale,” Missy was going to say, but stopped and looked down with a face from which all the light had gone—­a very different face from the one with which she had looked at him.  She would not mention to Katerina Alexeevna even, so vulgar a pun, but only said, “We all have our good and our bad days.”

“Is it possible that he, too, will deceive?” she thought; “after all that has happened it would be very bad of him.”

If Missy had had to explain what she meant by “after all that has happened,” she could have said nothing definite, and yet she knew that he had not only excited her hopes but had almost given her a promise.  No definite words had passed between them—­only looks and smiles and hints; and yet she considered him as her own, and to lose him would be very hard.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE AWAKENING.

“Shameful and stupid, horrid and shameful!” Nekhludoff kept saying to himself, as he walked home along the familiar streets.  The depression he had felt whilst speaking to Missy would not leave him.  He felt that, looking at it externally, as it were, he was in the right, for he had never said anything to her that could be considered binding, never made her an offer; but he knew that in reality he had bound himself to her, had promised to be hers.  And yet to-day he felt with his whole being that he could not marry her.

“Shameful and horrid, horrid and shameful!” he repeated to himself, with reference not only to his relations with Missy but also to the rest.  “Everything is horrid and shameful,” he muttered, as he stepped into the porch of his house.  “I am not going to have any supper,” he said to his manservant Corney, who followed him into the dining-room, where the cloth was laid for supper and tea.  “You may go.”

“Yes, sir,” said Corney, yet he did not go, but began clearing the supper off the table.  Nekhludoff looked at Corney with a feeling of ill-will.  He wished to be left alone, and it seemed to him that everybody was bothering him in order to spite him.  When Corney had gone away with the supper things, Nekhludoff moved to the tea urn and was about to make himself some tea, but hearing Agraphena Petrovna’s footsteps, he went hurriedly into the drawing-room,