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r, and stored in the three rooms until its owner's return.
Without looking, he could tell that Olga had risen from her seat and moved to another corner. This helped to relieve his breast of a certain amount of weight. None the less she continued to contemplate him, in order to see what he would do with the confectionery.
"Probably I had best eat them as quickly as possible," he thought; with which he fell to hurriedly selecting one after another. Luckily all were of the sort which melts in the mouth. When only two of them remained he heaved a sigh of relief, and decided to glance towards the corner where he knew Olga to be seated. Horrors! She was standing by a bust, with one hand resting on its pedestal, and her eyes closely observing him! Nay, she had even come out of her corner to get a closer view of him! Without doubt she must have noted his awkwardness with the biscuits!
True, at supper she sat at the other end or the table, and ate and talked as though she were in no way concerned with him; yet never once did he throw a timid glance in her direction but straightway he encountered her gaze--a gaze which, though good-humoured, was also charged with curiosity. That was enough. He hastened to take leave of her aunt, who invited him to come and dine another day. He bowed, and moved away across the drawing-room without raising his eyes. Presently he encountered a screen, with behind it, the grand piano. He looked again--and behold, behind the screen was seated Olga! She was still gazing at him with intent curiosity. Also, she seemed to him to be smiling.
"Certainly Andrei has often told me that I put on pairs of odd socks, and my shirt inside out," he reflected as he drove home. From that moment he could not get Olga's glance out of his head. In bed he lay on his back and tried to adopt the most comfortable attitudes; yet still he could not sleep....
One fine morning Tarantiev came and carried off the rest of Oblomov's furniture; with the result that its owner spent three such days as he had never before experienced--days during which he was bedless and sofa-less, and therefore driven to dine at the house of Olga's aunt. Suddenly he noticed that opposite the aunt's house there stood an untenanted villa. Consequently he hired it at sight, and went to live there. Thereafter he spent his whole time with Olga--he read with her, he culled flowers with her, he walked by the lake and over the hills with her. Yes, he, Oblomov! How came this about? It came about thus.
On the evening of the fateful dinner-party at the aunt's house Oblomov experienced the same torture during the meal as he had done on the previous occasion. Every word that he spoke he uttered with an acute sense that over him, like a searchlight, there was hovering that glance, and that it was burning and irritating him, and that it was stimulating his nerves and blood. Surely, on the balcony, he thought, he would be able, when ensconced behind a cloud of tobacco smoke, to succeed in momentarily concealing himself from that silent, that insistent gaze?
"What does it all mean?" he said to himself as he rocked himself to and fro. "Why, it is sheer torture! Have I made myself ridiculous? At no one else would she dare to stare as she does at me. I suppose it is because I am quieter than the rest. However, I will make an agreement with her. I will tell her, in so many words, that her eyes are dragging my very soul out of my body."
Suddenly she appeared on the threshold of the balcony. He handed her a chair, and she took a seat beside him.
"Ah? Schtoltz tells me that you are engaged in drawing up a scheme of some sort?"
"Yes. I want to live upon my estate, and am making a few preparations for doing so."
"And you are going abroad?"
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