“If only you would go abroad with us—” said Kátya; “without you we shall be quite lost there.”
“Oh, I should like to go round the world with you,” he said, half in jest and half in earnest.
“All right,” I said; “let us start off and go round the world.”
He smiled and shook his head.
“What about my mother? What about my business?” he said. “But that’s not the question just now: I want to know how you have been spending your time. Not depressed again, I hope?”
When I told him that I had been busy and not bored during his absence, and when Kátya confirmed my report, he praised me as if he had a right to do so, and his words and looks were kind, as they might have been to a child. I felt obliged to tell him, in detail and with perfect frankness, all my good actions, and to confess, as if I were in church, all that he might disapprove of. The evening was so fine that we stayed in the veranda after tea was cleared away; and the conversation interested me so much that I did not notice how we ceased by degrees to hear any sound of the servants indoors. The scent of flowers grew stronger and came from all sides; the grass was drenched with dew; a nightingale struck up in a lilac bush close by and then stopped on hearing our voices; the starry sky seemed to come down lower over our heads.
It was growing dusk, but I did not notice it till a bat suddenly and silently flew in beneath the veranda awning and began to flutter round my white shawl. I shrank back against the wall and nearly cried out; but the bat as silently and swiftly dived out from under the awning and disappeared in the half-darkness of the garden.
“How fond I am of this place of yours!” he said, changing the conversation;