you ill? Or has someone been nasty to you? Tell me, perhaps I could,
so to say . . . help you. . . ."

When, trying to console her, he ventured cautiously to remove her
hands from her face, she smiled at him through her tears and said:

"I . . . love you!"

These words, so simple and ordinary, were uttered in ordinary human
language, but Ognev, in acute embarrassment, turned away from Vera,
and got up, while his confusion was followed by terror.

The sad, warm, sentimental mood induced by leave-taking and the
home-made wine suddenly vanished, and gave place to an acute and
unpleasant feeling of awkwardness. He felt an inward revulsion; he
looked askance at Vera, and now that by declaring her love for him
she had cast off the aloofness which so adds to a woman's charm,
she seemed to him, as it were, shorter, plainer, more ordinary.

"What's the meaning of it?" he thought with horror. "But I . . .
do I love her or not? That's the question!"

And she breathed easily and freely now that the worst and most
difficult thing was said. She, too, got up, and looking Ivan
Alexeyitch straight in the face, began talking rapidly, warmly,
irrepressibly.

As a man suddenly panic-stricken cannot afterwards remember the
succession of sounds accompanying the catastrophe that overwhelmed
him, so Ognev cannot remember Vera's words and phrases. He can only