“Oh, finished it together.  Very well!  And did the prisoner talk to Kartinkin, and, if so, what about?”

Maslova suddenly frowned, blushed very red, and said, hurriedly, “What about?  I did not talk about anything, and that’s all I know.  Do what you like with me; I am not guilty, and that’s all.”

“I have nothing more to ask,” said the prosecutor, and, drawing up his shoulders in an unnatural manner, began writing down, as the prisoner’s own evidence, in the notes for his speech, that she had been in the empty room with Kartinkin.

There was a short silence.

“You have nothing more to say?”

“I have told everything,” she said, with a sigh, and sat down.

Then the president noted something down, and, having listened to something that the member on his left whispered to him, he announced a ten-minutes’ interval, rose hurriedly, and left the court.  The communication he had received from the tall, bearded member with the kindly eyes was that the member, having felt a slight stomach derangement, wished to do a little massage and to take some drops.  And this was why an interval was made.

When the judges had risen, the advocates, the jury, and the witnesses also rose, with the pleasant feeling that part of the business was finished, and began moving in different directions.

Nekhludoff went into the jury’s room, and sat down by the window.

CHAPTER XII.

Twelve years before.

“Yes, this was Katusha.”

The relations between Nekhludoff and Katusha had been the following: 

Nekhludoff first saw Katusha when he was a student in his third year at the University, and was preparing an essay on land tenure during the summer vacation, which he passed with his aunts.  Until then he had always lived, in summer, with his mother and sister on his mother’s large estate near Moscow.  But that year his sister had married, and his mother had gone abroad to a watering-place, and he, having his essay to write, resolved to spend the summer with his aunts.  It was very quiet in their secluded estate and there was nothing to distract his mind; his aunts loved their nephew and heir very tenderly, and he, too, was fond of them and of their simple, old-fashioned life.

During that summer on his aunts’ estate, Nekhludoff passed through that blissful state of existence when a young man for the first time, without guidance from any one outside, realises all the beauty and significance of life, and the importance of the task allotted in it to man; when he grasps the possibility of unlimited advance towards perfection for one’s self and for all the world, and gives himself to this task, not only hopefully, but with full conviction of attaining to the perfection he imagines.  In that year, while still at the University, he had read Spencer’s Social Statics, and Spencer’s views on landholding