to leave us alone together? It would never enter their heads, and
nothing is more hateful than to have to restrain one's raptures
simply because of the intrusion of some animate trumpery in the
shape of a half-deaf old woman or little girl pestering one with
questions. I sent an answer by the maid asking Sasha to select some
park or boulevard for a rendezvous. My suggestion was readily
accepted. I had struck the right chord, as the saying is.

Between four and five o'clock in the afternoon I made my way to the
furthest and most overgrown part of the park. There was not a soul
in the park, and the tryst might have taken place somewhere nearer
in one of the avenues or arbours, but women don't like doing it by
halves in romantic affairs; in for a penny, in for a pound--if
you are in for a tryst, let it be in the furthest and most impenetrable
thicket, where one runs the risk of stumbling upon some rough or
drunken man. When I went up to Sasha she was standing with her back
to me, and in that back I could read a devilish lot of mystery. It
seemed as though that back and the nape of her neck, and the black
spots on her dress were saying: Hush! . . . The girl was wearing a
simple cotton dress over which she had thrown a light cape. To add
to the air of mysterious secrecy, her face was covered with a white
veil. Not to spoil the effect, I had to approach on tiptoe and speak
in a half whisper.

From what I remember now, I was not so much the essential point of
the rendezvous as a detail of it. Sasha was not so much absorbed
in the interview itself as in its romantic mysteriousness, my kisses,
the silence of the gloomy trees, my vows. . . . There was not a
minute in which she forgot herself, was overcome, or let the
mysterious expression drop from her face, and really if there had