“Enough, Aleksei,” said Elisaveta tenderly. “You know how I respect you. We are friends. Give me your hand.” Stchemilov gave her hand a tight, comradely pressure, then bent down and kissed it. Elisaveta drew nearer to him and kissed his lips with a tranquil, innocent, delicious kiss, such as a sister gives a brother. Then she snatched up her bundle and ran into the passage, one of the doors of which led to a small storeroom where the literature was kept in a trunk under the floor. She ran into Kiril on the way. “Is Aleksei home, my lad?” “Yes,” said Elisaveta; “enter, comrade Kiril.” When Kiril heard the familiar voice and, lifting his eyes, saw plaits of hair wound around the lad’s head, he was astonished. He was very much embarrassed upon recognizing Elisaveta. She hid herself behind the door of the storeroom, while Kiril blundered for a long time in the dark hall, unable in his confusion to find the door. Others began to come in: there was the school-instructor Bodeyev, instructor Voronok of the town school, and the imported orator, who came accompanied by Alkina. Elisaveta was attired by now in a simple dark blue dress. “It’s time to start,” said Stchemilov. Once seated in the rowing-boat, the members of the party became silent and slightly nervous. Only the new-comer was perfectly calm--he was used to it. Near-sighted, he looked indifferently out of his spectacles, now one side, now the other, and told bits of news while smoking one cigarette after another. He was young, tall, and flat-chested. He had a lean face, long, smooth, chestnut-coloured hair, and a scant beard. His flat round cap, reddish in the sun, gave him the look of an artisan. It had begun to grow dark by the time they disembarked at the appointed place. There was still a half-verst to go through the wood on foot. The evening twilight seemed oppressed under the eternal vaults of the wood; it hummed and rustled with barely audible noises and the sad whisperings of stealthy beings. They gathered at last in a large glade in the midst of a tall, dense wood. The moon was already high in the sky, and the black shadows of the trees crept across half of the glade. The trees were intensely still and pensive, as if they wished to listen to the words of these people who had collected at their feet. But they really did not care to listen--they had their own life and were indifferent to all these people. And they suffered neither joy nor sadness at sheltering in their dark shade many young girls who were in love with the dream of liberation--among them Elisaveta, who was also in love with this dream, and who created for it a temple of young passion and embroidered into this dream’s design the image of a living man in a mysterious house. She was deliciously in love and painfully agitated by the sudden acknowledgment she made of her love in her poignantly sweet words, “I love another.”