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I sat down and read 'On the Hills of Georgia.'

'"That the heart cannot choose but love,"' repeated Zinaida.

'That's where poetry's so fine; it tells us what is not, and what's not only better than what is, but much more like the truth, "cannot choose but love," – it might want not to, but it can't help it.' She was silent again, then all at once she started and got up.

'Come along.

Meidanov's indoors with mamma, he brought me his poem, but I deserted him.

His feelings are hurt too now ... I can't help it! you'll understand it all some day ... only don't be angry with me!'

Zinaida hurriedly pressed my hand and ran on ahead.

We went back into the lodge.

Meidanov set to reading us his 'Manslayer,' which had just appeared in print, but I did not hear him.

He screamed and drawled his four-foot iambic lines, the alternating rhythms jingled like little bells, noisy and meaningless, while I still watched Zinaida and tried to take in the import of her last words.

'Perchance some unknown rival Has surprised and mastered thee?'

Meidanov bawled suddenly through his nose – and my eyes and Zinaida's met. She looked down and faintly blushed. I saw her blush, and grew cold with terror. I had been jealous before, but only at that instant the idea of her being in love flashed upon my mind. 'Good God! she is in love!'

My real torments began from that instant.

I racked my brains, changed my mind, and changed it back again, and kept an unremitting, though, as far as possible, secret watch on Zinaida.

A change had come over her, that was obvious.

She began going walks alone – and long walks.

Sometimes she would not see visitors; she would sit for hours together in her room.

This had never been a habit of hers till now.

I suddenly became – or fancied I had become – extraordinarily penetrating.

'Isn't it he? or isn't it he?' I asked myself, passing in inward agitation from one of her admirers to another. Count Malevsky secretly struck me as more to be feared than the others, though, for Zinaida's sake, I was ashamed to confess it to myself.

My watchfulness did not see beyond the end of my nose, and its secrecy probably deceived no one; any way, Doctor Lushin soon saw through me.

But he, too, had changed of late; he had grown thin, he laughed as often, but his laugh seemed more hollow, more spiteful, shorter, an involuntary nervous irritability took the place of his former light irony and assumed cynicism.

'Why are you incessantly hanging about here, young man?' he said to me one day, when we were left alone together in the Zasyekins' drawing-room.

(The young princess had not come home from a walk, and the shrill voice of the old princess could be heard within; she was scolding the maid.) 'You ought to be studying, working – while you're young – and what are you doing?'

Chapter X

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