Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume V).djvu/159

Rh as yet, confess to himself how beautiful Irina had seemed to him, how powerfully she had worked upon his feelings. Again the day passed dully and drearily. At dinner, Litvinov chanced to sit beside a majestic belhomme, with dyed moustaches, who said nothing, and only panted and rolled his eyes. . . but, being suddenly taken with a hiccup, proved himself to be a fellow-countryman, by at once exclaiming, with feeling, in Russian, 'There, I said I ought not to eat melons!' In the evening, too, nothing happened to compensate for a lost day; Bindasov, before Litvinov's very eyes, won a sum four times what he had borrowed from him, but, far from repaying his debt, he positively glared in his face with a menacing air, as though he were prepared to borrow more from him just because he had been a witness of his winnings. The next morning he was again invaded by a host of his compatriots; Litvinov got rid of them with difficulty, and setting off to the mountains, he first came across Irina—he pretended not to recognise her, and passed quickly by—and then Potugin. He was about to begin a conversation with Potugin, but the latter did not respond to him readily. He was leading by the hand a smartly dressed little girl, with fluffy, almost white curls, large black eyes, and a pale, sickly