“This man is deranged,” I said to myself, very much frightened.

The next moment he gave me a very special impression beyond the range of commonplace definitions.  It was as though he had stabbed himself outside and had come in there to show it; and more than that—­as though he were turning the knife in the wound and watching the effect.  That was the impression, rendered in physical terms.  One could not defend oneself from a certain amount of pity.  But it was for Miss Haldin, already so tried in her deepest affections, that I felt a serious concern.  Her attitude, her face, expressed compassion struggling with doubt on the verge of terror.

“What is it, Kirylo Sidorovitch?” There was a hint of tenderness in that cry.  He only stared at her in that complete surrender of all his faculties which in a happy lover would have had the name of ecstasy.

“Why are you looking at me like this, Kirylo Sidorovitch?  I have approached you frankly.  I need at this time to see clearly in myself....”  She ceased for a moment as if to give him an opportunity to utter at last some word worthy of her exalted trust in her brother’s friend.  His silence became impressive, like a sign of a momentous resolution.

In the end Miss Haldin went on, appealingly—­

“I have waited for you anxiously.  But now that you have been moved to come to us in your kindness, you alarm me.  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.

“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.