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.

"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?"

She hesitated as though she had not understood, then her face lighted
up.

"Yes," she said firmly.

"So he is absolved. Moreover, that Ziemianitch was a brute, a drunken
brute."

A shudder passed through Natalia Haldin.

"But a man of the people," Razumov went on, "to whom they, the
revolutionists, tell a tale of sublime hopes. Well, the people must
be forgiven.... And you must not believe all you've heard from that
source, either," he added, with a sort of sinister reluctance.

"You are concealing something from me," she exclaimed.

"Do you, Natalia Victorovna, believe in the duty of revenge?"

"Listen, Kirylo Sidorovitch. I believe that the future shall be merciful
to us all. Revolutionist