“By the way,” he remarked, “the nurse tells me that Olinka is troubled with a night cough. Ought we not to send for the doctor to-morrow?” “No. I have given her some hot medicine, and am going to keep her indoors for the present,” answered Olga dully. In silence they walked to the end of the avenue. “Why have you sent no reply to that letter from your friend Sonichka?” he inquired. “This is the third letter that you have left unanswered.” “I would rather forget her altogether,” was Olga’s brief rejoinder. “Then you are not well?” he continued after a pause. “Oh yes; nothing is the matter with me. Why should you think otherwise’?” “Then you are _ennuyée?_” She clasped her hands upon his shoulder. “No,” she said, in a tone of assumed cheerfulness--yet a tone in which the note of _ennui_ was only too plainly apparent. He led her clear of the shade of the trees, and turned her face to the moonlight. “Look at me,” he commanded. He gazed intently into her eyes. “One would say that you were unhappy,” he commented. “Your eyes have a strange expression in them which I have noticed more than once before. What is the matter with you, Olga?” She took him by the sleeve and drew him back into the shade. “Are you aware,” she said with forced gaiety, “that I am hungry for supper?” “No, no,” he protested. “Do not make a jest of this.” “Unhappy, indeed?” she said reproachfully, halting in front of him. “Yes, I _am_ unhappy--but only from excess of happiness.” So tender was her tone, and so caressing the note in her voice, that he bent down and kissed her. With that she grew bolder. The jesting supposition that she could be unhappy inspired her to greater frankness. “No, I am not _ennuyée_,” she went on; “nor should I ever be so. You know that well, yet you refuse to believe my words. Nor am I ill. It is merely that, that well, that sometimes a feeling of depression comes over me. You are a difficult man to conceal things from. Sometimes I feel depressed, though I could not say why.” She laid her head upon his shoulder. “Nevertheless, what _is_ the reason of it?” he asked her gently as he bent over her. “I do not know,” she repeated. “Yet there _must_ be a reason of some sort. If that reason lies neither in me nor in your surroundings, it must lie in yourself. Sometimes such depression is a symptom of ill-health. Are you _sure_ that you are quite well?” “At all events I feel so,” she replied gravely. “See for yourself how I eat and walk and sleep and work! Yet every now and then there comes over me a mood in which life seems to me incomplete.... Do not mind this, however. It is nothing--nothing at all.” “Tell me more,” he urged. “Certainly life is incomplete, but what would you add to it?”