general he talked readily with any one. He talked at length of the Turks, of their oppression, of the sorrows and disasters of his countrymen, and of their hopes: concentrated meditation on a single ruling passion could be heard in every word he uttered.

‘Ah, well, there’s no mistake about it,’ Bersenyev was reflecting meanwhile, ‘that Turkish aga, I venture to think, has been punished for his father’s and mother’s death.’

Insarov had not had time to say all he wanted to say, when the door opened and Shubin made his appearance.

He came into the room with an almost exaggerated air of ease and good-humour; Bersenyev, who knew him well, could see at once that something had been jarring on him.

‘I will introduce myself without ceremony,’ he began with a bright and open expression on his face. ‘My name is Shubin; I’m a friend of this young man here’ (he indicated Bersenyev). ‘You are Mr. Insarov, of course, aren’t you?’

‘I am Insarov.’

‘Then give me your hand and let us be friends. I don’t know if Bersenyev has talked to you about me, but he has told me a great deal about you. You are staying here? Capital! Don’t be offended at my staring at you so. I’m a sculptor by trade, and I foresee I shall in a little time be begging your permission to model your head.’

‘My head’s at your service,’ said Insarov.

‘What shall we do to-day, eh?’ began Shubin, sitting down suddenly on a low chair, with his knees apart and his elbows propped on them. ‘Andrei Petrovitch, has your honour any kind of plan for to-day? It’s glorious weather; there’s a scent of hay and dried strawberries as if one were drinking strawberry-tea for a cold. We ought to get up some kind of a spree. Let us show the new inhabitant of Kuntsov all its numerous beauties.’ (Something has certainly upset him, Bersenyev kept thinking to himself.) ‘Well, why art thou silent, friend Horatio? Open your prophetic lips. Shall we go off on a spree, or not?’

‘I don’t know how Insarov feels,’ observed Bersenyev. ‘He is just getting to work, I fancy.’

Shubin turned round on his chair.

‘You want to work?’ he inquired, in a somewhat condescending voice.

‘No,’ answered Insarov; ‘to-day I could give up to walking.’

‘Ah!’ commented Shubin. ‘Well, that’s delightful. Run along, my friend, Andrei Petrovitch, put a hat on your learned head, and let us go where our eyes lead us. Our eyes are young—they may lead us far. I know a very repulsive little restaurant, where they will give us a very beastly little dinner; but we shall be very jolly. Come along.’

Half an hour later they were all three walking along the bank of the Moskva. Insarov had a rather queer cap with flaps, over which Shubin fell into not very spontaneous raptures. Insarov walked without haste, and looked about, breathing, talking, and smiling with the same tranquillity; he was giving this day up to pleasure, and enjoying it to the utmost. ‘Just as well-behaved boys walk out on Sundays,’ Shubin whispered in Bersenyev’s ear. Shubin himself played the fool a great deal, ran in front, threw himself into the attitudes of famous statues, and turned somersaults on the grass; Insarov’s tranquillity did not exactly irritate him, but it spurred him on to playing antics. ‘What a fidget you are, Frenchman!’ Bersenyev said twice to him. ‘Yes, I am French, half French,’ Shubin answered, ‘and you hold the happy medium between jest and earnest, as a waiter once said to me.’ The young men turned away from the river and went along a deep and narrow ravine between two walls of tall golden rye; a bluish shadow was cast on them from the rye on one side; the flashing sunlight seemed to glide over the tops of the ears; the larks were singing, the quails were calling: on all sides was the brilliant green of the grass; a warm breeze stirred and lifted the leaves and shook the heads of the flowers. After prolonged wanderings, with rest and chat between (Shubin had even tried to play leap-frog with a toothless peasant they met, who did nothing but laugh, whatever the gentlemen might do to him), the young men reached the ‘repulsive little’ restaurant: the waiter almost knocked each of them over, and did really provide them with a very bad dinner with a sort of Balkan wine, which did not, however, prevent them from being very jolly, as Shubin had foretold; he himself was the loudest and the least jolly. He drank to the health of the incomprehensible but great Venelin, the health of the Bulgarian king Kuma, Huma, or Hroma, who lived somewhere about the time of Adam.

‘In the ninth century,’ Insarov corrected him.

‘In the ninth century?’ cried Shubin. ‘Oh, how delightful!’

Bersenyev noticed that among all his pranks, and jests and gaiety, Shubin was constantly, as it were, examining Insarov; he was sounding him and was in inward excitement, but Insarov remained as before, calm and straightforward.

At last they returned home, changed their dress, and resolved to finish the day as they had begun it, by going that evening to the Stahovs. Shubin ran on before them to announce their arrival.

XII

‘The conquering hero Insarov will be here directly!’ he shouted triumphantly, going into the Stahovs’ drawing-room, where there happened at the instant to be only Elena and Zoya.

‘Wer?’ inquired Zoya in German. When she was taken unawares she always used her native language. Elena drew herself up. Shubin looked at her with a playful smile on his lips. She felt annoyed, but said nothing.

‘You heard,’ he repeated, ‘Mr. Insarov is coming here.’

‘I heard,’ she replied; ‘and I heard how you spoke of him. I am surprised at you, indeed. Mr. Insarov has not yet set foot in the house, and you already think fit to turn him into ridicule.’

Shubin was crestfallen at once.

‘You are right, you are always right, Elena Nikolaevna,’ he muttered; ‘but I meant nothing, on my honour. We have been walking together with him the whole day, and he’s a capital fellow, I assure you.’

‘I didn’t ask your opinion about that,’ commented Elena, getting up.

‘Is Mr. Insarov a young man?’ asked Zoya.

‘He is a hundred and forty-four,’ replied Shubin with an air of vexation.

The page announced the arrival of the two friends. They came in. Bersenyev introduced Insarov. Elena asked them to sit down, and sat down herself, while Zoya went off upstairs; she had to inform Anna Vassilyevna of their arrival. A conversation was begun of a rather insignificant kind, like all first conversations. Shubin was silently watching from a corner, but there was nothing to watch. In Elena he detected signs of repressed annoyance against him—Shubin—and that was all. He looked at Bersenyev and at Insarov, and compared their faces from a sculptor’s point of view. ‘They are neither of them good-looking,’ he thought, ‘the Bulgarian has a characteristic face—there now it’s in a good light; the Great-Russian is better adapted for painting; there are no lines, there’s expression. But, I dare say, one might fall in love with either of them. She is not in love yet, but she will fall in love with Bersenyev,’ he decided to himself. Anna Vassilyevna made her appearance in the drawing-room, and the conversation took the tone peculiar to summer villas—not the country-house tone but the peculiar summer visitor tone. It was a conversation diversified by plenty of subjects; but broken by short rather wearisome pauses every three minutes. In one of these pauses Anna Vassilyevna turned to Zoya. Shubin understood her silent hint, and drew a long face, while Zoya sat down to the piano, and played and sang all her pieces through. Uvar Ivanovitch showed himself for an instant in the doorway, but he beat a retreat, convulsively twitching his fingers. Then tea was served; and then the whole party went out into the garden…. It began to grow dark outside, and the guests took leave.

Insarov had really made less impression on Elena than she had expected, or, speaking more exactly, he had not made the impression she had expected. She liked his directness and unconstraint, and she liked his face; but the whole character of Insarov—with his calm firmness and everyday simplicity—did not somehow accord with the image formed in her brain by Bersenyev’s account of him. Elena, though she did not herself suspect it, had anticipated something more fateful. ‘But,’ she reflected, ‘he spoke very little to-day, and I am myself to blame for it; I did not question him, we must have patience till next time… and his eyes are expressive, honest eyes.’ She felt that she had no disposition to humble herself before him, but rather to hold out her hand to him in friendly equality, and she was puzzled; this was not how she had fancied men, like Insarov, ‘heroes.’ This last word reminded her of Shubin, and she grew hot and angry, as she lay in her bed.

‘How did you like your new acquaintances?’ Bersenyev inquired of Insarov on their way home.

‘I liked them very much,’ answered Insarov, ‘especially the daughter. She must be a nice girl. She is excitable, but in her it’s a fine kind of excitability.’

‘You must go and see them a little oftener,’ observed Bersenyev.

‘Yes, I must,’ said Insarov; and he said nothing more all the way home. He at once shut himself up in his room, but his candle was burning long after midnight.

Bersenyev had had time to read a page of Raumer, when a handful of fine gravel came rattling on his window-pane. He could not help