Besides these seven women, there were four others who stood near the open windows, their hands resting on the iron gratings, and conversing by signs and shouts with the prisoners whom Maslova had met in the passageway.  One of these, who was serving a sentence for theft, was a flabby, large, heavy, red-haired woman with white-yellow freckles over her face, and a stout neck which was exposed by the open waist collar.  In a hoarse voice she shouted indecent words through the window.  Beside her stood a woman of the size of a ten-year-old girl, very dark, with a long back and very short legs.  Her face was red and blotched; her black eyes wide open, and her short, thick lips failed to hide her white, protruding teeth.  She laughed in shrill tones at the antics of the prisoners.  This prisoner, who was nicknamed Miss Dandy, because of her stylishness, was under indictment for theft and incendiarism.  Behind them, in a very dirty, gray shirt, stood a wretched-looking woman, big with child, who was charged with concealing stolen property.  This woman was silent, but she approvingly smiled at the actions of the prisoners without.  The fourth of the women who stood at the window, and was undergoing sentence for illicit trading in spirits, was a squat little country woman with bulging eyes and kindly face.  She was the mother of the boy who was playing with the old woman, and of another seven-year-old girl, both of whom were in jail with her, because they had no one else to take care of them.  Knitting a stocking, she was looking through the window and disapprovingly frowned and closed her eyes at the language used by the passing prisoners.  The girl who stood near the red-haired woman, with only a shirt on her back, and clinging with one hand to the woman’s skirt, attentively listened to the abusive words the men were exchanging with the women, and repeated them in a whisper, as if committing them to memory.  The twelfth was the daughter of a church clerk and chanter who had drowned her child in a well.  She was a tall and stately girl, with large eyes and tangled hair sticking out of her short, thick, flaxen braid.  She paid no attention to what was going on around her, but paced, bare-footed, and in a dirty gray shirt, over the floor of the cell, making sharp and quick turns when she reached the wall.

CHAPTER XXXI.

When with a rattling of chains the cell door was unlocked and Maslova admitted, all eyes were turned toward her.  Even the chanter’s daughter stopped for a moment and looked at her with raised eyebrows, but immediately resumed walking with long, resolute strides.  Korableva stuck her needle into the sack she was sewing and gazed inquiringly through her glasses at Maslova.

“Ah me!  So she has returned,” she said in a hoarse basso voice.  “And I was sure she would be set right.  She must have got it.”

She removed her glasses and placed them with her sewing beside her.