This was not a mere guess; her connection with the child was still so close, that she could gauge by the flow of her milk his need of food, and knew for certain he was hungry.

She knew he was crying before she reached the nursery.  And he was indeed crying.  She heard him and hastened.  But the faster she went, the louder he screamed.  It was a fine healthy scream, hungry and impatient.

“Has he been screaming long, nurse, very long?” said Kitty hurriedly, seating herself on a chair, and preparing to give the baby the breast.  “But give me him quickly.  Oh, nurse, how tiresome you are!  There, tie the cap afterwards, do!”

The baby’s greedy scream was passing into sobs.

“But you can’t manage so, ma’am,” said Agafea Mihalovna, who was almost always to be found in the nursery.  “He must be put straight.  A-oo! a-oo!” she chanted over him, paying no attention to the mother.

The nurse brought the baby to his mother.  Agafea Mihalovna followed him with a face dissolving with tenderness.

“He knows me, he knows me.  In God’s faith, Katerina Alexandrovna, ma’am, he knew me!” Agafea Mihalovna cried above the baby’s screams.

But Kitty did not hear her words.  Her impatience kept growing, like the baby’s.

Their impatience hindered things for a while.  The baby could not get hold of the breast right, and was furious.

At last, after despairing, breathless screaming, and vain sucking, things went right, and mother and child felt simultaneously soothed, and both subsided into calm.

“But poor darling, he’s all in perspiration!” said Kitty in a whisper, touching the baby.

“What makes you think he knows you?” she added, with a sidelong glance at the baby’s eyes, that peered roguishly, as she fancied, from under his cap, at his rhythmically puffing cheeks, and the little red-palmed hand he was waving.

“Impossible!  If he knew anyone, he would have known me,” said Kitty, in response to Agafea Mihalovna’s statement, and she smiled.

She smiled because, though she said he could not know her, in her heart she was sure that he knew not merely Agafea Mihalovna, but that he knew and understood everything, and knew and understood a great deal too that no one else knew, and that she, his mother, had learned and come to understand only through him.  To Agafea Mihalovna, to the nurse, to his grandfather, to his father even, Mitya was a living being, requiring only material care, but for his mother he had long been a mortal being, with whom there had been a whole series of spiritual relations already.

“When he wakes up, please God, you shall see for yourself.  Then when I do like this, he simply beams on me, the darling!  Simply beams like a sunny day!” said Agafea Mihalovna.

“Well, well; then we shall see,” whispered Kitty.  “But now go away, he’s going to sleep.”

Chapter 7