friendship and gratitude for the tenderness with which she attended to his wants.  Nabatoff and Rintzeva were attached to each other by very complicated ties.  Just as Mary Pavlovna was a perfectly chaste maiden, in the same way Rintzeva was perfectly chaste as her own husband’s wife.  When only a schoolgirl of sixteen she fell in love with Rintzeff, a student of the Petersburg University, and married him before he left the university, when she was only nineteen years old.  During his fourth year at the university her husband had become involved in the students’ rows, was exiled from Petersburg, and turned revolutionist.  She left the medical courses she was attending, followed him, and also turned revolutionist.  If she had not considered her husband the cleverest and best of men she would not have fallen in love with him; and if she had not fallen in love would not have married; but having fallen in love and married him whom she thought the best and cleverest of men, she naturally looked upon life and its aims in the way the best and cleverest of men looked at them.  At first he thought the aim of life was to learn, and she looked upon study as the aim of life.  He became a revolutionist, and so did she.  She could demonstrate very clearly that the existing state of things could not go on, and that it was everybody’s duty to fight this state of things and to try to bring about conditions in which the individual could develop freely, etc.  And she imagined that she really thought and felt all this, but in reality she only regarded everything her husband thought as absolute truth, and only sought for perfect agreement, perfect identification of her own soul with his which alone could give her full moral satisfaction.  The parting with her husband and their child, whom her mother had taken, was very hard to bear; but she bore it firmly and quietly, since it was for her husband’s sake and for that cause which she had not the slightest doubt was true, since he served it.  She was always with her husband in thoughts, and did not love and could not love any other any more than she had done before.  But Nabatoff’s devoted and pure love touched and excited her.  This moral, firm man, her husband’s friend, tried to treat her as a sister, but something more appeared in his behaviour to her, and this something frightened them both, and yet gave colour to their life of hardship.

So that in all this circle only Mary Pavlovna and Kondratieff were quite free from love affairs.

CHAPTER XIV.

CONVERSATIONS IN PRISON.

Expecting to have a private talk with Katusha, as usual, after tea, Nekhludoff sat by the side of Kryltzoff, conversing with him.  Among other things he told him the story of Makar’s crime and about his request to him.  Kryltzoff listened attentively, gazing at Nekhludoff with glistening eyes.

“Yes,” said Kryltzoff suddenly, “I often think that here we are going side by side with them, and who are they?  The same for whose sake we are going, and yet we not only do not know them, but do not even wish to know them.  And they, even worse than that, they hate us and look upon us as enemies.  This is terrible.”