‘You don’t stop me, Elena; we will go together.’
‘Yes, Dmitri, let us go together; I will follow you.... That is my duty. I love you.... I know no other duty.’
‘O Elena!’ said Insarov, ‘what chains every word of yours fastens on me!’
‘Why talk of chains?’ she interposed. ‘We are free people, you and I. Yes,’ she went on, looking musingly on the floor, while with one hand she still stroked his hair, ‘I experienced much lately of which I had never had any idea! If any one had told me beforehand that I, a young lady, well brought up, should go out from home alone on all sorts of made-up excuses, and to go where? to a young man’s lodgings—how indignant I should have been! And that has all come about, and I feel no indignation whatever. Really!’ she added, and turned to Insarov.
He looked at her with such an expression of adoration, that she softly dropped her hand from his hair over his eyes.
‘Dmitri!’ she began again, ‘you don’t know of course, I saw you there in that dreadful bed, I saw you in the clutches of death, unconscious.’
‘You saw me?’
‘Yes.’
He was silent for a little. ‘And Bersenyev was here?’
She nodded.