The visitors soon left.
Kirsha came without being called—confused and agitated by an indefinable something. He was silent, and his dark eyes flamed with sadness and fear. He walked up to the window, looked out in an attitude of expectancy. He seemed to see something in the distance. There was a look of apprehension in his dark, wide-open eyes, as if they were fixed on a strange distant vision. Thus people look during a hallucination.
Kirsha turned to his father and, growing pale, said quietly:
“Father, a visitor has come to you from quite afar. How strange that he has come in a simple carriage and in ordinary clothes! I wonder why he has come?”
They could hear the crunching sound of the sand under the iron hoops of the wheels of the calash which had just entered the gates. Kirsha’s face wore a gloomy expression. It was difficult to comprehend what was in his soul—was it a reproach?—astonishment?—fear?
Trirodov went to the window. A man of about forty, impressive for his appearance of calm and self-assurance, stepped out of the calash. Trirodov recognized his visitor at the first glance, though he had never met him before in society. He knew him well, but only from portraits he had seen of him, from his literary works, and from the stories of his admirers and articles about him. In his youth Trirodov had had some slight relations with him through friends, but this was interrupted. He had not even met him.
Trirodov suddenly felt both cheerful and sad. He reflected:
“Why has he come to me? What does he want of me? And why should he suddenly think of me? Our roads have diverged so much, we have become such strangers to one another.”
There was his disturbing curiosity:
“I’ll see and hear him for the first time.”