Marfa Timofyevna came to her assistance.

“Well, if you won’t entertain him,” said Marfa Timofyevna, “who will, poor fellow?  I am too old for him, he is too clever for me, and for Nastasya Karpovna he’s too old, it’s only the quite young men she will look at.”

“How can I entertain Fedor Ivanitch?” said Lisa.  “If he likes, had I not better play him something on the piano?” she added irresolutely.

“Capital; you’re my clever girl,” rejoined Marfa Timofyevna.  “Step down-stairs, my dears; when you have finished, come back:  I have been made old maid, I don’t like it, I want to have my revenge.”

Lisa got up.  Lavretsky went after her.  As she went down the staircase, Lisa stopped.

“They say truly,” she began, “that people’s hearts are full of contradictions.  Your example ought to frighten me, to make me distrust marriage for love; but I—­”

“You have refused him?” interrupted Lavretsky.

“No; but I have not consented either.  I told him everything, everything I felt, and asked him to wait a little.  Are you pleased with me?” she added with a swift smile—­and with a light touch of her hand on the banister she ran down the stairs.

“What shall I play to you?” she asked, opening the piano.

“What you like,” answered Lavretsky as he sat down so that he could look at her.

Lisa began to play, and for a long while she did not lift her eyes from her fingers.  She glanced at last at Lavretsky, and stopped short; his face seemed strange and beautiful to her.

What is the matter with you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he replied; “I’m very happy; I’m glad of you, I’m glad to see you—­go on.”

“It seems to me,” said Lisa a few moments later, “that if he had really loved me, he would not have written that letter; he must have felt that I could not give him an answer now.”

“That is of no consequence,” observed Lavretsky, “what is important is that you don’t love him.”

“Stop, how can we talk like this?  I keep thinking of you dead wife, and you frighten me.”

“Don’t you think, Voldemar, that Liseta plays charmingly?” Marya Dmitrievna was saying at that moment to Panshin.

“Yes,” answered Panshin, “very charmingly.”

Marya Dmitrievna looked tenderly at her young partner, but the latter assumed a still more important and care-worn air and called fourteen kings.

Chapter XXXI

Lavretsky was not a young man; he could not long delude himself as to the nature of the feeling inspired in him by Lisa; he was brought on that day to the final conviction that he loved her.  This conviction did not give him ay great pleasure.  “Have I really nothing better to do,” he thought, “at thirty-five than to put my soul into a woman’s keeping again?  But Lisa is not like her; she would not demand degrading sacrifices from me: