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