he articulated, 'I am dying.'

She fell with a scream on her knees, and clung to his breast.

'It's all over,' repeated Insarov: 'I'm dying... Good-bye, my poor girl!
good-bye, my country!' and he fell backwards on to the sofa.

Elena rushed out of the room, began calling for help; a waiter ran for a
doctor. Elena clung to Insarov.

At that instant in the doorway appeared a broad-shouldered, sunburnt
man, in a stout frieze coat and a low oil-skin hat. He stood still in
bewilderment.

'Renditch!' cried Elena, 'it's you! Look, for God's sake, he's ill!
What's wrong? Good God! He went out yesterday, he was talking to me just
now.'

Renditch said nothing and only moved on one side. There slipped quickly
past him a little figure in a wig and spectacles; it was a doctor living
in the same hotel. He went up to Insarov.

'Signora,' he said, after the lapse of a few minutes, 'the foreign
gentleman is dead--_il Signore forestiere e morte_--of aneurism in
combination with disease of the lungs.'

XXXV

The next day, in the same room, Renditch was standing at the window;
before him, wrapped in a shawl, sat Elena. In the next room, Insarov
lay in his coffin. Elena's face was both scared and lifeless; two lines
could be seen on her forehead between her eyebrows; they gave a strained
expression to her fixed eyes. In the window lay an open letter from Anna
Vassilyevna. She begged her daughter to come to Moscow if only for a
month, complained of her loneliness, and of Nikolai Artemyevitch, sent
greetings to Insarov, inquired after his health, and begged him to spare
his wife.

Renditch was a Dalmatian, a sailor, with whom Insarov had become
acquainted during his wanderings in his own country, and whom he had
sought out in Venice. He was a dry, gruff man, full of daring and
devoted to the Slavonic cause. He despised the Turks and hated the
Austrians.

'How long must you remain at Venice?' Elena asked him in Italian. And
her voice was as lifeless as her face.

'One day for freighting and not to rouse suspicions, and then straight
to Zara. I shall have sad news for our countrymen. They have long been
expecting him; they rested their hopes on him.'

'They rested their hopes on him,' Elena repeated mechanically.

'When will you bury him?' asked Renditch.

Elena not at once replied, 'To-morrow.'

'To-morrow? I will stop; I should like to throw a handful of earth into
his grave. And you will want help. But it wou