he broke out
impatiently. "Tomorrow I shall make our marriage public. You never will
live in a palace, get that out of your head. Do you want to live with
me for the rest of your life, only very far away from here? In the
mountains in Switzerland, there's a place there.... Don't be afraid.
I'll never abandon you or put you in a madhouse. I shall have money
enough to live without asking anyone's help. You shall have a servant,
you shall do no work at all. Everything you want that's possible shall
be got for you. You shall pray, go where you like, and do what you like.
I won't touch you. I won't go away from the place myself at all. If you
like, I won't speak to you all my life, or if you like, you can tell
me your stories every evening as you used to do in Petersburg in the
corners. I'll read aloud to you if you like. But it must be all your
life in the same place, and that place is a gloomy one. Will you? Are
you ready? You won't regret it, torment me with tears and curses, will
you?"

She listened with extreme curiosity, and for a long time she was silent,
thinking.

"It all seems incredible to me," she said at last, ironically and
disdainfully. "I might live for forty years in those mountains," she
laughed.

"What of it? Let's live forty years then..." said Nikolay
Vsyevolodovitch, scowling.

"H'm! I won't come for anything."

"Not even with me?"

"And what are you that I should go with you? I'm to sit on a mountain
beside him for forty years on end--a pretty story! And upon my word,
how long-suffering people have become nowadays! No, it cannot be that a
falcon has become an owl. My prince is not like that!" she said, raising
her head proudly and triumphantly.

Light seemed to dawn upon him.

"What makes you call me a prince, and... for whom do you take me?" he
asked quickly.

"Why, aren't you the prince?"

"I never have been one."

"So yourself, yourself, you tell me straight to my face that you're not
the prince?"

"I tell you I never have been."

"Good Lord!" she cried, clasping her hands. "I was ready to expect
anything from _his_ enemies, but such insolence, never! Is he alive?" she
shrieked in a frenzy, turning upon Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch. "Have you
killed him? Confess!"

"Whom do you take me for?" he cried, jumping up from his chair with
a distorted face; but it was not easy now to frighten her. She was
triumphant.

"Who can tell who you are and where you've sprung from? Only my heart,