Page:The Kiss and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhoff, 1908.pdf/47

 Some twenty paces from the wood the road crossed a nanow bridge with posts at the corners. During their spring walks, this bridge was a stopping place for the Kuznetsoffs and their visitors. Thence they could draw echoes from the wood, and watch the road as it vanished in a black drive.

“We are at the bridge,” said Ogneff. “You must return.”

Vera stopped, and drew a deep breath.

“Let us sit down for a minute,” she said, seating herself on a pillar. “When we say good-bye to friends we always sit down here.”

Ogneff sat beside her on his parcel of books, and continued to speak. Vera breathed heavily, and looked straight into the distance, so that he could not see her face.

“Perhaps some day, in ten years' time, we'll meet somewhere again,” he said. “Things will be different. You will be the honoured mother of a family, and I the author of a respectable, useless book of statistics, fat as forty thousand albums put together. . . . To-night, the present counts, it absorbs and agitates us. But ten years hence we shall remember neither the date nor the month, nor even the year, when we sat on this bridge together for the last time. You, of course, will be changed. You will change.”

“What?”