"I don't know," said Vera, also whispering. "He won't tell me."
He pushed past them then into the dining-room, looked about him for a moment, then sank into a chair as though his legs would no longer support him, holding on to the cloth with both hands.
The sisters followed him into the dining-room.
"Don't shiver like that!" said Vera, "tell us why you've come in here?"...
His eyes looked past them, never still, wandering from wall to wall, from door to door.
"They're after me..." he said. "That's it--I was hiding in our cupboard all last night and this morning. They were round there all the time breaking up our things.... I heard them shouting. They were going to kill me. I've done nothing--O God! what's that?"
"There's no one here," said Vera, "except ourselves."
"I saw a chance to get away and I crept out. But I couldn't get far.... I knew you would be good-hearted... good-hearted. Hide me somewhere--anywhere!... and they won't come in here. Only until the evening. I've done no one any harm.... Only my duty...."
He began to snivel, taking out from his coat a very dirty pocket-handkerchief and dabbing his face with it.
The odd thing that they felt, as they looked at him, was the incredible intermingling of public and private affairs. Five minutes before they had been passing through a tremendous crisis in their personal relationship. The whole history of their lives together, flowing through how many years, through how many phases, how many quarrels, and happiness and adventures had reached here a climax whose issue was so important that life between them could never be the same again.
So urgent had been the affair that during that hour they had forgotten the Revolution, Russia, the war. Moreover, always in the past, they had assumed that public life was no affair of theirs. The Russo-Japanese War, even the spasmodic revolt in 1905, had not touched them except as a wind of ideas which blew so swiftly through their private lives that they were scarcely affected by it.
Now in the person of that trembling, shaking figure at their table, the Revolution had come to them, and not only the Revolution, but the strange new secret city that Petrograd was... the whole ground was quaking beneath them.