The question surprised Nekhludoff, but, seeing the boy’s serious, intelligent face, with bright, attentive eyes, gravely answered that he was awaiting a woman acquaintance.

“Well, is she your sister?” asked the boy.

“No, she is not my sister,” Nekhludoff answered with surprise.  “And with whom 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.