avenue, coming from a quarter where I was not looking for him. He had walked round by the dell. He came quickly towards me, with his hat off and radiant with high spirits. Seeing that Kátya was asleep, he bit his lip, closed his eyes, and advanced on tiptoe; I saw at once that he was in that peculiar mood of causeless merriment which I always delighted to see in him, and which we called “wild ecstasy.” He was just like a schoolboy playing truant; his whole figure, from head to foot, breathed content, happiness, and boyish frolic.
“Well, young violet, how are you? All right?” he said in a whisper, coming up to me and taking my hand. Then, in answer to my question, “Oh, I’m splendid today, I feel like a boy of thirteen—I want to play at horses and climb trees.”
“Is it wild ecstasy?” I asked, looking into his laughing eyes, and feeling that the “wild ecstasy” was infecting me.
“Yes,” he answered, winking and checking a smile. “But I don’t see why you need hit Katerína Kárlovna on the nose.”
With my eyes on him I had gone on waving the branch, without noticing that I had knocked the handkerchief off Kátya’s face and was now brushing her with the leaves. I laughed.
“She will say she was awake all the time,” I whispered, as if not to awake Kátya; but that was not my real reason—it was only that I liked to whisper to him.
He moved his lips in imitation of me, pretending that my voice was too low for him to hear. Catching sight of the dish of cherries, he pretended to steal it, and carried it off to Sónya under the lime tree, where he sat down on her dolls. Sónya was angry at first, but he soon made his peace with her by starting a game, to see which of them could eat cherries faster.