‘‘Yes, yes,’’ she said, ‘‘but you have no need to regret the past, count. As I conceive of your life now, you will always think of it with satisfaction, because the self-sacrifice in which you are now …’’

‘‘I cannot accept your praises,’’ he interrupted hurriedly; ‘‘on the contrary, I am always reproaching myself; but it is an uninteresting and cheerless subject.’’

And again the stiff and cold expression came back into his face. But Princess Marya saw in him again now the man she had known and loved, and it was to that man only she was speaking now.

‘‘I thought you would allow me to say that,’’ she said. ‘‘I have been such intimate friends with you … and with your family, and I thought you would not feel my sympathy intrusive; but I made a mistake,’’ she said. Her voice suddenly shook. ‘‘I don’t know why,’’ she went on, recovering herself, ‘‘you used to be different, and …’’

‘‘There are thousands of reasons why.’’ (He laid special stress on the word why.) ‘‘I thank you, princess,’’ he added softly. ‘‘It is sometimes hard …’’

‘‘So that is why! That is why!’’ an inner voice was saying in Princess Marya’s soul. ‘‘Yes, it was not only that gay, kind, and frank gaze, not only that handsome exterior I loved in him; I divined his noble, firm, and self-sacrificing soul,’’ she said to herself.

‘‘Yes, he is poor now, and I am rich … Yes, it is only that … Yes, if it were not for that …’’ And recalling all his former tenderness, and looking now at his kind and sad face, she suddenly understood the reason of his coldness.

‘‘Why! count, why?’’ she almost cried all at once, involuntarily moving nearer to him. ‘‘Why, do tell me. You must tell me.’’ He was mute. ‘‘I do not know, count, your why,’’ she went on. ‘‘But I am sad, I … I will own that to you. You mean for some reason to deprive me of our old friendship. And that hurts me.’’ There were tears in her eyes and in her voice. ‘‘I have had so little happiness in my life that every loss is hard for me … Excuse me, good-bye,’’ she suddenly burst into tears, and was going out of the room.

‘‘Princess! stay, for God’s sake,’’ he cried, trying to stop her. ‘‘Princess!’’

She looked round. For a few seconds they gazed mutely in each other’s eyes, and the remote and impossible became all at once close at hand, possible and inevitable.