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I won't I won't bear it." The Princess sighed. "Tamara, forgive me for asking you, but I must, I feel I must. Do you love him, child?" Then passion flamed up in Tamara's white face, her secret was her own, and she would defend it even from this kind friend so "I believe I hate him!" she said.
"PFUI! What indecency is this! ..." the majestic Emma Edwardovna was saying in the corridor, making an indignant face. "And eternally this Jennka! ... Always this Jennka! ... It seems my patience has already burst ..." But Jennka was nowhere neither in her room, nor in Tamara's. They looked into other chambers, in all the out-of-the-way corners ... But she did not prove to be even there.
"He is really too fascinating," she said, as she came into Tamara's cabin to fetch her for the evening meal. "I hardly think Henry would like his devotion to me. What do you think, dear?" "I am sure he would be awfully jealous, Milly darling; you really must be careful," Tamara said. And with a conscious air of complacent pleasantly tickled virtue Mrs. Hardcastle led the way to the saloon.
"Your friend has got a chill, and seems to have had a severe shock," he said when he came from Tamara's room. "Make her rest in bed today, and then distract her with cheerful society." And the Princess pondered as she sat in the blue salon alone. A shock what had happened? Could fear of the storm have caused a shock? She felt very worried.
She paused again, and Tamara's eyes fixed themselves in fascinated fear on her face. The Princess, after smoothing out the glove in her hand with a nervous energy, went on: "They had all had quite enough champagne, of course, and apparently Boris refused, and suggested that they should toss up, and whoever won the toss should have first shot in the dark." "Yes," said Tamara faintly.
He locked it after him, and pocketed the key; then he faced her. What she saw in his passionate eyes turned her lips gray with fear. And now everything of that subtle thing in womankind which resists capture, came uppermost in Tamara's spirit. She loved him but even so she would not be taken.
The Prince was dancing with Princess Shébanoff, and her charming face was turned up to him with an adoring smile. "Poor Tatiane, " Countess Olga said low to herself. When the gipsies returned, their music grew wilder than ever, and some of the solos seemed to touch responsive chords in Tamara's very bones.
She had loved him, and her sisters and brother, and father, all in the same devoted way, and when pneumonia had carried him off nearly two years before, she had grieved with the measure the loss of any one of them would have caused her that was sincerely and tenderly. They were such a nice family, Tamara's!
"You hardly look any more twenty, perhaps, and never kissed!" A memory rose up of a scorched neck, and suddenly Tamara's long eyelashes rested on her cheek. Then into his splendid eyes came a fierce, savage, passionate gleam, which she did not see, but dimly felt, and he said in a low voice a little thick: "And as yet never really kissed."
Presently Tamara's elbow slipped and the pistol jerked forward. In a second the Prince had sprung into an alert position, but she straightened herself, and put it back in its place, and he relaxed the tension, and once more reclined on the couch. And now there floated through Tamara's confused brain the thought that perhaps it would be better to shoot in any case shoot and have done with it.
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