“I didn’t want to spoil your happiness!” Mitya faltered blissfully. But she did not need his answer.
“Well, go and enjoy yourself …” she sent him away once more. “Don’t cry, I’ll call you back again.”
He would run away, and she listened to the singing and looked at the dancing, though her eyes followed him wherever he went. But in another quarter of an hour she would call him once more and again he would run back to her.
“Come, sit beside me, tell me, how did you hear about me, and my coming here yesterday? From whom did you first hear it?”
And Mitya began telling her all about it, disconnectedly, incoherently, feverishly. He spoke strangely, often frowning, and stopping abruptly.
“What are you frowning at?” she asked.
“Nothing. … I left a man ill there. I’d give ten years of my life for him to get well, to know he was all right!”
“Well, never mind him, if he’s ill. So you meant to shoot yourself tomorrow! What a silly boy! What for? I like such reckless fellows as you,” she lisped, with a rather halting tongue. “So you would go any length for me, eh? Did you really mean to shoot yourself tomorrow, you stupid? No, wait a little. Tomorrow I may have something to say to you. … I won’t say it today, but tomorrow. You’d like it to be today? No, I don’t want to today. Come, go along now, go and amuse yourself.”
Once, however, she called him, as it were, puzzled and uneasy.