She was brought up in the warm, indulged with whatever she wanted, but now she’ll walk seven versts* at night, alone…”

This amazed his mother. She stood in the middle of the room and, with her eyebrows shifting in surprise, looked at her son in silence. Then she asked quietly:

“Will she be walking into town?”

“That’s right.”

“Oh dear! And she isn’t afraid?”

“That’s just it – she isn’t!” said Pavel, smiling.

“But why? She could have spent the night here – could have come to bed with me!”

“Too awkward! She might be seen here tomorrow morning, and that we don’t need.”

With a pensive glance out of the window, the mother asked quietly:

“I don’t understand, Pasha, what is it that’s dangerous or forbidden about this? I mean, it’s nothing bad, is it?”

She was uncertain of this and wanted to hear confirmation from her son in reply. Looking her calmly in the eye, he declared firmly:

“Bad – no. But all the same, prison lies ahead for each of us. You ought to know that…”

Her hands shook. In a dejected voice she said:

“But perhaps, God willing, things will somehow turn out all right?…”

“No!” her son said gently. “I’m not going to deceive you. They won’t!”

He smiled.

“Go to bed – you’re tired, aren’t you? Goodnight!”

Left alone, she went up to the window and stood in front of it, gazing into the street. Outside the window it was cold and murky. The wind was playing, blowing the snow down off the roofs of the sleepy little houses, beating against the walls and saying something in a hurried whisper, falling to the ground and chasing white clouds of dry snowflakes down the street.

“Jesus Christ, have mercy upon us!” the mother whispered quietly.

There were tears coming to the boil in her heart, and fluttering blindly and mournfully like a moth was the expectation of the woe of which her son had spoken with such calm and certainty. There rose before her eyes a flat, snowy plain. With a cold, thin whistling, the wind, white and shaggy, is rushing and speeding along. In the midst of the plain, swaying and lonely, walks the small, dark figure of a girl. The wind gets caught in her legs, blows her skirt about, throws prickly snowflakes into her face. Walking is difficult, and her little legs sink into the snow. It is cold and frightening. The girl is bent forward and is like a blade of grass in the midst of the murky plain, in the frisky play of the autumn wind. To her right, in the marsh, stands the dark wall of the forest, and from there comes the doleful noise of the thin, bare birches and aspens. Somewhere far ahead is the dull flicker of the lights of the town…

“Lord, have mercy!” whispered the mother, with a shudder of fear…

VII

The days slipped by, one after another, like the beads of a rosary, adding together into weeks and months. Every Saturday, Pavel’s comrades would come and visit him, and every gathering was one step in a long, gently rising staircase leading to somewhere in the distance and slowly taking people higher.

New people would appear. The Vlasovs’ little room would get cramped and stuffy. Natasha would arrive, frozen through and tired, but always inexhaustibly cheerful and lively. The mother knitted stockings for her and put them on her little legs herself. At first Natasha laughed, but then suddenly fell silent, fell into thought and said quietly:

“I used to have a nanny who was astonishingly kind as well! How strange it is, Pelageya Nilovna – working people lead such hard, such painful lives, and yet they have more heart, more kindness than others have!”

And she waved a hand, pointing to somewhere in the distance, very far away from her.

“See the way you are!” said Vlasova. “Deprived of your parents and everything…” But she did not know how to finish her thought, and she sighed and fell silent, gazing into Natasha’s face and feeling grateful to her for something. She was sitting on the floor in front of her, and the girl was smiling pensively with her head bowed.

“Deprived of my parents?” she repeated. “That’s not a problem! My father is so rude, and my brother too. And he’s a drunk. My elder sister is unfortunate… She married a man much older than her… Very rich, boring, greedy.