greener, and the sparrows were noisily chirrupping and quarrelling in the bare lilac bushes), considerably to my surprise, I caught sight of Musa a little to one side, not far from the fence. She was there before me. I was going towards her; but she herself came to meet me.
'Let's go to the Kreml wall,' she whispered in a hurried voice, running her downcast eyes over the ground; 'there are people here.'
We went along the path up the hill.
'Musa Pavlovna,' I was beginning. . . . But she cut me short at once.
'Please,' she began, speaking in the same jerky and subdued voice, 'don't criticise me, don't think any harm of me. I wrote a letter to you, I made an appointment to meet you, because . . . I was afraid. . . . It seemed to me yesterday,—you seemed to be laughing all the time. Listen,' she added, with sudden energy, and she stopped short and turned towards me: 'listen; if you tell with whom . . . if you mention at whose room you met me, I'll throw myself in the water, I'll drown myself, I'll make an end of myself!'
At this point, for the first time, she glanced at me with the inquisitive, piercing look I had seen before.
'Why, she, perhaps, really . . . would do it,' was my thought.
'Really, Musa Pavlovna,' I protested, hurriedly: 'how can you have such a bad
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