On the very day on which Elena had written this last fatal line in her diary, Insarov was sitting in Bersenyev’s room, and Bersenyev was standing before him with a look of perplexity on his face. Insarov had just announced his intention of returning to Moscow the next day.

‘Upon my word!’ cried Bersenyev. ‘Why, the finest part of the summer is just beginning. What will you do in Moscow? What a sudden decision! Or have you had news of some sort?’

‘I have had no news,’ replied Insarov; ‘but on thinking things over, I find I cannot stop here.’

‘How can that be?’

‘Andrei Petrovitch,’ said Insarov, ‘be so kind . . . don’t insist, please, I am very sorry myself to be leaving you, but it can’t be helped.’

Bersenyev looked at him intently.

‘I know,’ he said at last, ‘there’s no persuading you. And so, it’s a settled matter,

‘Is it?

‘Absolutely settled,’ replied Insarov, getting up and going away.

Bersenyev walked about the room, then took his hat and set off for the Stahovs.

‘You have something to tell me,’ Elena said to him, directly they were left alone.

‘Yes, how did you guess?’

‘Never mind; tell me what it is.’

Bersenyev told her of Insarov’s intention.

Elena turned white.

‘What does it mean?’ she articulated with effort

‘You know,’ observed Bersenyev, ‘Dmitri Nikanorovitch does not care to give reasons for his actions. But I think . . . let us sit down, Elena Nikolaevna, you don’t seem very well. . . . I fancy I can guess what is the real cause of this sudden departure.’

‘What — what cause?’ repeated Elena, and unconsciously she gripped tightly Bersenyev’s hand in her chill ringers.

‘You see,’ began Bersenyev, with a pathetic smile, ‘how can I explain to you? I must go back to last spring, to the time when I began to be more intimate with Insarov. I used to meet him then at the house of a relative, who had a daughter, a very pretty girl I thought that Insarov cared for her, and I told him so. He laughed, and answered that I was mistaken, that he was quite heart-whole, but if anything of that sort did happen to him, he should run away directly, as he did not want, in his own words, for the sake of personal feeling, to be false to his cause and his duty. “I am a Bulgarian,” he said, “and I have no need of a Russian love ——”

‘Well — so — now you ——’ whispered Elena. She involuntarily turned away her head, like a man expecting a blow, but she still held the hand she had clutched.

‘I think,’ he said, and his own voice sank, ‘I think that what I fancied then has really happened now.’

‘That is — you think — don’t torture me!’ broke suddenly from Elena.

‘I think,’ Bersenyev continued hurriedly, ‘that Insarov is in love now with a Russian girl, and he is resolved to go, according to his word.’

Elena clasped his hand still tighter, and her head drooped still lower, as if she would hide from other eyes the flush of shame which suddenly blazed over her face and neck.

‘Andrei Petrovitch, you are kind as an angel,’ she said, ‘but will he come to say goodbye?’

‘Yes, I imagine so; he will be sure to come. He wouldn’t like to go away ——’

‘Tell him, tell him ——’

But here the poor girl broke down; tears rushed streaming from her eyes, and she ran out of the room.

‘So that’s how she loves him,’ thought Bersenyev, as he walked slowly home. ‘I didn’t expect that; I didn’t think she felt so strongly. I am kind, she says:’ he pursued his reflections: . . . ‘Who can tell what feelings, what impulse drove me to tell Elena all that? It was not kindness; no, not kindness. It was all the accursed desire to make sure whether the dagger is really in the wound. I ought to be content. They love each other, and I have been of use to them. . . . The future go-between between science and the Russian public Shubin calls me; it seems as though it had been decreed at my birth that I should be a go-between. But if I’m mistaken? No, I’m not mistaken ——’

It was bitter for Andrei Petrovitch, and he could not turn his mind to Raumer.

The next day at two o’clock Insarov arrived at the Stahovs’. As though by express design, there was a visitor in Anna Vassilyevna’s drawing-room at the time, the wife of a neighbouring chief-priest, an excellent and worthy woman, though she had had a little unpleasantness with the police, because she thought fit, in the hottest part of the day, to bathe in a lake near the road, along which a certain dignified general’s family used often to be passing. The presence of an outside person was at first even a relief to Elena, from whose face every trace of colour vanished, directly she heard Insarov’s step; but her heart sank at the thought that he might go without a word with her alone. He, too, seemed confused, and avoided meeting her eyes. ‘Surely he will not go directly,’ thought Elena. Insarov was, in fa............