You speak obscurely. It seems
as if you were keeping back something from me."
"Tell me, Natalia Victorovna," he was heard at last in a strange
unringing voice, "whom did you see in that place?"
She was startled, and as if deceived in her expectations.
"Where? In Peter Ivanovitch's rooms? There was Mr. Laspara and three
other people."
"Ha! The vanguard--the forlorn hope of the great plot," he commented to
himself. "Bearers of the spark to start an explosion which is meant to
change fundamentally the lives of so many millions in order that Peter
Ivanovitch should be the head of a State."
"You are teasing me," she said. "Our dear one told me once to remember
that men serve always something greater than themselves--the idea."
"Our dear one," he repeated slowly. The effort he made to appear unmoved
absorbed all the force of his soul. He stood before her like a being
with hardly a breath of life. His eyes, even as under great physical
suffering, had lost all their fire. "Ah! your brother.... But on
your lips, in your voice, it sounds...and indeed in you everything is
divine.... I wish I could know the innermost depths of your thoughts,
of your feelings."
"But why, Kirylo Sidorovitch?" she cried, alarmed by these words coming
out of strangely lifeless lips.
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