“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.
“Have no fear. It is not to betray you. So you went there?... And Sophia Antonovna, what did she tell you, then?”
“She said very little, really. She knew that I should hear everything from you. She had no time for more than a few words.” Miss Haldin’s voice dropped and she became silent for a moment. “The man, it appears, has taken his life,” she said sadly.
“Tell me, Natalia Victorovna,” he asked after a pause, “do you believe in remorse?”
“What a question!”
“What can you know of it?” he muttered thickly. “It is not for such as you.... What I meant to ask was whether you believed in the efficacy of remorse?”