The prisoners, bearded, clean-shaven, old, young, Russians and foreigners—­some with half-shaved heads, and with a clinking of iron fetters, filled the passage with dust, tramping of feet, conversation and a sharp odor of perspiration.  The prisoners, as they passed Maslova, scanned her from head to foot; some approached and teased her.

“Fine girl, that!” said one.  “My compliments, auntie,” said another, winking one eye.  A dark man with a shaven, blue neck and long mustache, tangling in his fetters, sprang toward her and embraced her.

“Don’t you recognize your friend?  Come, don’t put on such style!” he exclaimed, grinning as she pushed him away.

“What are you doing, you rascal?” shouted the officer in charge of the prisoners.

The prisoner hastily hid himself in the crowd.  The officer fell upon Maslova.

“What are you doing here?”

Maslova was going to say that she had been brought from the court, but she was very tired and too lazy to speak.

“She is just from the court, sir,” said one of the guards, elbowing his way through the passing crowd, and raising his hand to his cap.

“Then take her to the warden.  What indecencies!”

“Very well, sir!”

“Sokoloff!  Take her away!” shouted the officer.

Sokoloff came and angrily pushed Maslova by the shoulder, and, motioning to her to follow him, he led her into the woman’s corridor.  There she was thoroughly searched, and as nothing was found upon her (the box of cigarettes was hidden in the lunch roll), she was admitted into the same cell from which she had emerged in the morning.

CHAPTER XXX.

The cell in which Maslova was confined was an oblong room, twenty feet by fifteen.  The kalsomining of the walls was peeled off, and the dry boards of the cots occupied two-thirds of the space.  In the middle of the room, opposite the door, was a dark iron, with a wax candle stuck on it, and a dusty bouquet of immortelles hanging under it.  To the left, behind the door, on a darkened spot of the floor, stood an ill-smelling vat.  The women had been locked up for the night.

There were fifteen inmates of this cell, twelve women and three children.

It was not dark yet, and only two women lay in their cots; one a foolish little woman—­she was constantly crying—­who had been arrested because she had no written evidence of her identity, had her head covered with her coat; the other, a consumptive, was serving a sentence for theft.  She was not sleeping, but lay, her coat under her head, with wide-open eyes, and with difficulty retaining in her throat the tickling, gurgling phlegm, so as not to cough.  The other women were with bare heads and skirts of coarse linen; some sat on their cots sewing; others stood at the window gazing on the passing prisoners.  Of the three women who were sewing, one, Korableva,