'Why don't you go to sleep?' she asked at last.

'Wait a little.' He took her hand, and placed it under his head.
'There--that is nice. Wake me at once directly Renditch comes. If he
says the ship is ready, we will start at once. We ought to pack
everything.'

'Packing won't take long,' answered Elena.

'That fellow babbled something about a battle, about Servia,' said
Insarov, after a short interval. 'I suppose he made it all up. But we
must, we must start. We can't lose time. Be ready.'

He fell asleep, and everything was still in the room.

Elena let her head rest against the back of her chair, and gazed a
long while out of the window. The weather had changed for the worse;
the wind had risen. Great white clouds were scudding over the sky, a
slender mast was swaying in the distance, a long streamer, with a red
cross on it, kept fluttering, falling, and fluttering again. The
pendulum of the old-fashioned clock ticked drearily, with a kind of
melancholy whirr. Elena shut her eyes. She had slept badly all night;
gradually she, too, fell asleep.

She had a strange dream. She thought sha was floating in a boat on the
Tsaritsino lake with some unknown people. They did not speak, but sat
motionless, no one was rowing; the boat was moving by itself. Elena
was not afraid, but she felt dreary; she wanted to know who were these
people, and why she was with them? She looked and the lake grew