"Whom do you want?" said the voice of Nikolay Levin, angrily.

"It's I," answered Konstantin Levin, coming forward into the

light.

"Who's _I_?" Nikolay's voice said again, still more angrily. He

could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something,

and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes,

and the huge, thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar,

and yet astonishing in its weirdness and sickliness.

He was even thinner than three years before, when Konstantin

Levin had seen him last. He was wearing a short coat, and his

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hands and big bones seemed huger than ever. His hair had grown

thinner, the same straight mustaches hid his lips, the same eyes

gazed strangely and naively at his visitor.

"Ah, Kostya!" he exclaimed suddenly, recognizing his brother, and

his eyes lit up with joy. But the same second he looked round at

the young man, and gave the nervous jerk of his head and neck

that Konstantin knew so well, as if his neckband hurt him; and a

quite different expression, wild, suffering, and cruel, rested

on his emaciated face.

"I wrote to you and Sergey Ivanovitch both that I don't know you

and don't want to know you. What is it you want?"

He was not at all the same as Konstantin had been fancying him.

The worst and most tiresome part of his character, what made all

relations with him so difficult, had been forgotten by Konstantin

Levin when he thought of him, and now, when he saw his face, and

especially that nervous twitching of his head, he remembered it

all.

"I didn't want to see you for anything," he answered timidly.

"I've simply come to see you."

His brother's timidity obviously softened Nikolay. His lips

twitched.

"Oh, so that's it?" he said. "Well, come in; sit down. Like

some supper? Masha, bring supper for three. No, stop a minute.

Do you know who this is?" he said, addressing his brother, and

indicating the gentleman in the jerkin: "This is Mr. Kritsky, my

friend from Kiev, a very remarkable man. He's persecuted by the

police, of course, because he's not a scoundrel."

And he looked round in the way he always did at everyone in the

room. Seeing that the woman standing in the doorway was moving

to go, he shouted to her, "Wait a minute, I said." And with the

inability to express himself, the incoherence that Konstantin

knew so well, he began, with another look round at everyone, to

tell his brother Kritsky's story: how he had been expelled from

the university for starting a benefit society for the poor

students and Sunday schools; and how he had afterwards been a

teacher in a peasant school, and how he had been driven out of

that too, and had afterwards been condemned for something.




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