"Kremen," added she, with a voice of some emotion, "was the cause of our earliest quarrel; and I wish now for concord, concord forever." While saying this, she looked into Pan Stanislav's eyes with a coquetry full of sweetness, which a bad woman is able to put on at any time, but an honest woman only when she is beginning to love. "She is wonderfully kind," thought he. Straightway he added aloud, "You might have a fabulous weapon against me, for you might lead me to perdition with kindness." "I do not wish to lead you to that," replied she. And in sign that she did not, she began to shake her dark, shapely head laughingly; and Pan Stanislav looked at her smiling face, and her mouth a trifle too large, and said mentally,-- "Whether I love her, or love her not, no one attracts me as she does." In fact, she had never occupied him and never pleased him more, even when he felt no shade of doubt that he loved her, and when he was struggling with that feeling. But at last he took farewell of her, for it had grown late; and after a while he and Gantovski found themselves on the street. Pan Stanislav who never had been able to guard himself from impulsiveness, stopped the unfortunate "bear," and asked almost angrily,-- "Did you know that it was I who bought the oak at Kremen?" "I did," answered Gantovski; "for your agent, that man who says that he is descended from Tartars--I forget what his name is--was at my house in Yalbrykov, and told me that it was you." "Why, then, did you make the scandal with Pan Mashko, not with me?" "Do not push me to the wall so," answered Gantovski, "for I do not like it. I raised the scandal with him, not with you, because the Plavitskis have nothing to do with you; but that man is obliged to pay them yearly from Kremen the amount he has engaged to pay, and if he ruins Kremen, he will have nothing to pay from. If you wished to know why I attacked him, you know now." Pan Stanislav had to confess in his soul that there was a certain justice in Gantovski's answer; hence he began the conversation at once from another side,-- "Pan Mashko has begged me to be his second, that's why I interfere in this question. I shall call on you to-morrow as a second; but as a private man, and a relative, though a distant one, of Pan Plavitski, I can tell you to-day only this,--that you have rendered the poorest service to Pan Plavitski, and if he and his daughter are left without a morsel of bread, they will have you to thank for it. This is the truth!" Gantovski's eyes became perfectly round. "Without a morsel of bread? They will thank me for it?" "That is the position," repeated Pan Stanislav. "But listen carefully. Without reference to the result of the scandal, the circumstances are such that it may have the most fatal results. I say this to you, on my word: you have, perhaps, ruined Pan Plavitski, and taken from him and his daughter the way, or rather the means, of living."