m are you?"

"I am with mamma. She is a political," said the boy.

"Maria Pavlovna, take away Kolia!" said the inspector, evidently
finding Nekhludoff's conversation with the boy contrary to the law.

Maria Pavlovna, the same beautiful woman who had attracted
Nekhludoff's attention, rose and with heavy, long strides approached
him.

"What is he asking you? Who you are?" she asked, slightly smiling with
her beautifully curved lips, and confidingly looking at him with her
prominent, kindly eyes, as though expecting Nekhludoff to know that
her relations to everybody always have been, are and ought to be
simple, affable, and brotherly. "He must know everything," she said,
and smiled into the face of the boy with such a kindly, charming smile
that both the boy and Nekhludoff involuntarily also smiled.

"Yes, he asked me whom I came to see."

"Maria Pavlovna, you know that it is not permitted to speak to
strangers," said the inspector.

"All right," she said, and, taking the little hand of the boy into her
own white hand, she returned to the consumptive's mother.

"Whose boy is that?" Nekhludoff asked the inspector.

"He is the son of a political prisoner, and was born in prison."

"Is it possible?"

"Yes, and now he is following his mother to Siberia."

"And that girl?"

"I cannot answer it," said the inspector, shrugging his shoulders.
"Ah, there is Bogodukhovskaia."

CHAPTER LIII.

The short-haired, lean, yellow-faced Vera Efremovna, with her large,
kindly eyes, entered timidly through the rear door.

"Well, I thank you for coming here," she said, pressing Nekhludoff's
hand. "You remember me? Let us sit down."

"I did not expect to find you here."

"Oh, I am doing excellently--so well, indeed, that I desire nothing
better," said Vera Efremovna, looking frightened, as usual, with her
kindly, round eyes at Nekhludoff, and turning her very thin, sinewy
neck, which projected from under the crumpled, dirty collar of her
waist.

Nekhludoff asked her how she came to be in prison. She related her
case to him with great animation. Her discourse was interspersed with
foreign scientific terms about propaganda, disorganization, groups,
sections and sub-sections, which, she was perfectly certain, everybody
knew, but of which Nekhludoff had never even heard.

She was evidently sure that it was both interesting and pleasant to
him to know all that she was relating. Nekhludoff, however, looked at
her pit