Page:The Bet and Other Stories.djvu/114

102 "Let's have some breakfast, Katy," I say with a constrained smile.

Instantly I add in a sinking voice:

"I shall be dead soon, Katy. . . ."

"Only one word, only one word," she weeps and stretches out her hands to me. "What shall I do?"

"You're a queer thing, really . . .", I murmur. "I can't understand it. Such a clever woman and suddenly—weeping. . . ."

Comes silence. Katy arranges her hair, puts on her hat, then crumples her letters and stuffs them in her little bag, all in silence and unhurried. Her face, her bosom and her gloves are wet with tears, but her expression is dry already, stern. . . I look at her and am ashamed that I am happier than she. It was but a little while before my death, in the ebb of my life, that I noticed in myself the absence of what our friends the philosophers call the general idea; but this poor thing's soul has never known and never will know shelter all her life, all her life.

"Katy, let's have breakfast," I say.

"No, thank you," she answers coldly.

One minute more passes in silence.

"I don't like Kharkov," I say. "It's too grey. A grey city."

"Yes . . . ugly. . . . I'm not here for long. . . . On my way. I leave to-day."

"For where?"

"For the Crimea . . . I mean, the Caucasus."

"So. For long?"