Bulgaria. Elena listened to him with absorbed, profound, and mournful
attention. When he had finished, she asked him once more:

'Then you would not stay in Russia for anything?'

And when he went away, for a long time she gazed after him. On that
day he had become a different man for her. When she walked back with
him through the garden, he was no longer the man she had met two hours
before.

From that day he began to come more and more often, and Bersenyev less
and less often. A strange feeling began to grow up between the two
friends, of which they were both conscious, but to which they could
not give a name, and which they feared to analyse. In this way a month
passed.





XV


Anna Vassilyevna, as the reader knows already, liked staying at home;
but at times she manifested, quite unexpectedly, an irresistible
longing for something out of the common, some extraordinary _partie du
plaisir_, and the more troublesome the _partie du plaisir_ was, the more
preparations and arrangements it required, and the greater Anna
Vassilyevna's own agitation over it, the more pleasure it gave her.
If this mood came upon her in winter, she would order two or three