“What? You yourself wish me to leave you for him?” she cried with a scornful look and a proud smile. Never before had she addressed me thus.
Then her head must have turned dizzy with emotion, for suddenly she seated herself upon the sofa, as though she were powerless any longer to stand.
A flash of lightning seemed to strike me as I stood there. I could scarcely believe my eyes or my ears. She did love me, then! It was to me, and not to Mr. Astley, that she had turned! Although she, an unprotected girl, had come to me in my room—in an hotel room—and had probably compromised herself thereby, I had not understood!
Then a second mad idea flashed into my brain.
“Polina,” I said, “give me but an hour. Wait here just one hour until I return. Yes, you must do so. Do you not see what I mean? Just stay here for that time.”
And I rushed from the room without so much as answering her look of inquiry. She called something after me, but I did not return.
Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible conception, will become so fixed in one’s head that at length one believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate, desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as something fated, inevitable, and foreordained—something bound to happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a self-annulment of one’s true expectations, and so on, I do not know; but, at all events that night saw happen to me (a night which I shall never forget) something in the nature of the miraculous. Although the occurrence can