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 Zina�da. 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 Zina�da’s sake, I was ashamed to confess it to myself.

My watchfulness did