“No, Vera, tragedy,” he whispered in a lifeless voice, and sat down on the chair near the divan.
The tone of his voice moved her to turn and look keenly at him, and her eyes opened wide with astonishment. She threw aside her shawl, and rose, she had divined in Raisky’s face the presence of the same deadly suffering that she herself endured.
“What is your trouble? Are _you_ unhappy?” she said, laying her hand on his shoulder. In the simple word and in the tone of her voice there were revealed the generous qualities of a woman, sympathy, selflessness, and love.
Keenly touched by the kindness and tenderness in her voice he looked at her with the same rapturous gratitude which she had worn on her face yesterday when in self-forgetfulness he had helped her down the precipice. She returned generosity with generosity, just as yesterday there had streamed from him a gleam of one of the highest qualities of the human mind. He was all the more in despair over what he had done, and wept hot tears. He hid his face in his hands like a man for whom all is lost.
“What have I done? I have insulted you, woman and sister.”
“Do not make us both suffer,” she said in a gentle, friendly tone. “Spare me; you see how I am.”
He tried not to meet her eyes, and she again lay down on the divan.
“What a blow I dealt you,” he whispered in horror. “You see my punishment, Vera!”
“Your blow gave me a minute’s pain, and then I understood that it was not delivered with an indifferent hand, that you loved me. And it became clear to me how you must have suffered ... yesterday.”
“Don’t justify my crime, Vera. A knife is a knife, and I aimed a knife at you.”
“You brought me to myself. I was as if I slept, and you, Grandmother, Marfinka and the whole house I saw as if in a dream.”
“What am I to do, Vera? Fly from here? In what a state of mind I should leave! Let me endure my penance here, and be reconciled, as far as is possible, with myself, with all that has happened here.”
“Your imagination paints what was only a fault as a crime. Remember your condition when you did it, your agitation!” She gave him her hand, and continued, “I know now what one is capable of doing in the fever of emotion.”
She set herself to calm him in spite of her own weariness.