“Is he alive? Has he awakened?”
“Yes,” said Grisha. “Egorushka is sighing in his grave; he’s just awakened.”
Kirsha ran home to his father and repeated to him Grisha’s words.
“We must make haste,” said Trirodov.
He again experienced an agitation with which he had been long familiar. He felt in himself an ebb and flow as of some strange power. A kind of marvellous energy, gathered by some means known to himself alone, issued slowly from him. A mysterious current passed between himself and the grave where the boy who had departed from life lay in the throes of death-sleep; it cast a spell upon the sleeper and caused him to stir.
Trirodov quickly descended the stairway into the room where the quiet children slept. His light footsteps were barely audible, and his feet felt the cold that came from the planked floor. The quiet children lay upon their beds motionlessly, as if they did not breathe. It seemed as if there were many of them, and that they slept eternally in the endless darkness of that quiet bedchamber.
Trirodov paused seven times, and each time one of the sleepers awoke at his one glance. Three boys and four girls answered his call. They stood there tranquilly, looked at Trirodov and waited.
“Follow me!” said Trirodov.
They walked after him, the white quiet ones, and the rustle of their light footsteps was barely heard.
Kirsha waited in the garden—and he seemed earthly and dark among the white, quiet children.