“Seryozha!” she whispered, going noiselessly up to him.
When she was parted from him, and all this latter time when she had been feeling a fresh rush of love for him, she had pictured him as he was at four years old, when she had loved him most of all. Now he was not even the same as when she had left him; he was still further from the four-year-old baby, more grown and thinner. How thin his face was, how short his hair was! What long hands! How he had changed since she left him! But it was he with his head, his lips, his soft neck and broad little shoulders.
“Seryozha!” she repeated just in the child’s ear.
He raised himself again on his elbow, turned his tangled head from side to side as though looking for something, and opened his eyes. Slowly and inquiringly he looked for several seconds at his mother standing motionless before him, then all at once he smiled a blissful smile, and shutting his eyes, rolled not backwards but towards her into her arms.
“Seryozha! my darling boy!” she said, breathing hard and putting her arms round his plump little body. “Mother!” he said, wriggling about in her arms so as to touch her hands with different parts of him.
Smiling sleepily still with closed eyes, he flung fat little arms round her shoulders, rolled towards her, with the delicious sleepy warmth and fragrance that is only found in children, and began rubbing his face against her neck and shoulders.
“I know,” he said, opening his eyes; “it’s my birthday today. I knew you’d come. I’ll get up directly.”
And saying that he dropped asleep.
Anna looked at him hungrily; she saw how he had grown and changed in her absence. She knew, and did not know, the bare legs so long now, that