v
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