“One must look beyond the present.”  Her tone had an ardent conviction.

“The blind can do that best.  I have had the misfortune to be born clear-eyed.  And if you only knew what strange things I have seen!  What amazing and unexpected apparitions!...  But why talk of all this?”

“On the contrary, I want to talk of all this with you,” she protested with earnest serenity.  The sombre humours of her brother’s friend left her unaffected, as though that bitterness, that suppressed anger, were the signs of an indignant rectitude.  She saw that he was not an ordinary person, and perhaps she did not want him to be other than he appeared to her trustful eyes.  “Yes, with you especially,” she insisted.  “With you of all the Russian people in the world....”  A faint smile dwelt for a moment on her lips.  “I am like poor mother in a way.  I too seem unable to give up our beloved dead, who, don’t forget, was all in all to us.  I don’t want to abuse your sympathy, but you must understand that it is in you that we can find all that is left of his generous soul.”

I was looking at him; not a muscle of his face moved in the least.  And yet, even at the time, I did not suspect him of insensibility.  It was a sort of rapt thoughtfulness.  Then he stirred slightly.

“You are going, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” she asked.

“I!  Going?  Where?  Oh yes, but I must tell you first....”  His voice was muffled and he forced himself to produce it with visible repugnance, as if speech were something disgusting or deadly.  “That story, you know—­the story I heard this afternoon....”

“I know the story already,” she said sadly.

“You know it!  Have you correspondents in St. Petersburg too?”

“No.  It’s Sophia Antonovna.  I have seen her just now.  She sends you her greetings.  She is going away to-morrow.”

He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down, and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes.  And I observed them.  There was nothing else to do.  My existence seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now make a movement.  And I thought to myself that, of course, they had to come together, the sister and the friend of that dead man.  The ideas, the hopes, the aspirations, the cause of Freedom, expressed in their common affection for Victor Haldin, the moral victim of autocracy,—­all this must draw them to each other fatally.  Her very ignorance and his loneliness to which he had alluded so strangely must work to that end.  And, indeed, I saw that the work was done already.  Of course.  It was manifest that they must have been thinking of each other for a long time before they met.  She had the letter from that beloved brother kindling her imagination by the severe praise attached to that