staying for the next three days."

"Well, bid me do so, and I will go to him by the first train tomorrow,"
I exclaimed with enthusiasm.

She smiled.

"If you were to do that," she said, "he would merely tell you to be so
good as first to return him the fifty thousand francs. What, then,
would be the use of having a quarrel with him? You talk sheer nonsense."

I ground my teeth.

"The question," I went on, "is how to raise the fifty thousand francs.
We cannot expect to find them lying about on the floor. Listen. What of
Mr. Astley?" Even as I spoke a new and strange idea formed itself in my
brain.

Her eyes flashed fire.

"What? YOU YOURSELF wish me to leave you for him?" she cried with a
scornful look and a proud smile. Never before had she addressed me thus.

Then her head must have turned dizzy with emotion, for suddenly she
seated herself upon the sofa, as though she were powerless any longer
to stand.

A flash of lightning seemed to strike me as I stood there. I could
scarcely believe my eyes or my ears. She DID love me, then! It WAS to
me, and not to Mr. Astley, that she had turned! Although she, an
unprotected girl, had come to me in my room--in an hotel room--and had
probably compromised herself thereby, I had not understood!

Then a second mad idea flashed into my brain.

"Polina," I said, "give me but an hour. Wait here just one hour until I
return. Yes, you MUST do so. Do you not see what I mean? Just stay here
for that time."

And I rushed from the room without so much as answering her look of
inquiry. She called something after me, but I did not return.

Sometimes it happens that the most insane thought, the most impossible
conception, will become so fixed in one's head that at length one
believes the thought or the conception to be reality. Moreover, if with
the thought or the conception there is combined a strong, a passionate,
desire, one will come to look upon the said thought or conception as
something fated, inevitable, and foreordained--something bound to
happen. Whether by this there is connoted something in the nature of a
combination of presentiments, or a great effort of will, or a
self-annulment of one's true expectations, and so on, I do not know;
but, at all events that night saw happen to me (a night which I shall
never forget) something in the nature of the miraculous. Although the
occurrence can easily be explained by arithmetic, I still believe it to
have been a miracle. Ye