During the first fortnight of Insarov’s stay in the Kuntsovo neighbourhood, he did not visit the Stahovs more than four or five times; Bersenyev went to see them every day. Elena was always pleased to see him, lively and interesting talk always sprang up between them, and yet he often went home with a gloomy face. Shubin scarcely showed himself; he was working with feverish energy at his art; he either stayed locked up in his room, from which he would emerge in a blouse, smeared all over with clay, or else he spent days in Moscow where he had a studio, to which models and Italian sculptors, his friends and teachers, used to come to see him. Elena did not once succeed in talking with Insarov, as she would have liked to do; in his absence she prepared questions to ask him about many things, but when he came she felt ashamed of her plans. Insarov’s very tranquillity embarrassed her; it seemed to her that she had not the right to force him to speak out; and she resolved to wait; for all that, she felt that at every visit however trivial might be the words that passed between them, he attracted her more and more; but she never happened to be left alone with him — and to grow intimate with any one, one must have at least one conversation alone with him. She talked a great deal about him to Bersenyev. Bersenyev realised that Elena’s imagination had been struck by Insarov, and was glad that his friend had not ‘missed fire’ as Shubin had asserted. He told her cordially all he knew of him down to the minutest details (we often, when we want to please some one, bring our friends into our conversation, hardly ever suspecting that we are praising ourselves in that way), and only at times, when Elena’s pale cheeks flushed a little and her eyes grew bright and wide, he felt a pang in his heart of that evil pain which he had felt before.

One day Bersenyev came to the Stahovs, not at the customary time, but at eleven o’clock in the morning. Elena came down to him in the parlour.

‘Fancy,’ he began with a constrained smile, ‘our Insarov has disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’ said Elena.

‘He has disappeared. The day before yesterday he went off somewhere and nothing has been seen of him since.’

‘He did not tell you where he was going?’

‘No.’

Elena sank into a chair.

‘He has most likely gone to Moscow,’ she commented, trying to seem indifferent and at the same time wondering that she should try to seem indifferent.

‘I don’t think so,’ rejoined Bersenyev. ‘He did not go alone.’
............