“Yes, I will beg her pardon, as children do.” . . .  He stopped—–­“will marry her if necessary.”  He stopped again, folded his hands in front of his breast as he used to do when a little child, lifted his eyes, and said, addressing some one:  “Lord, help me, teach me, come enter within me and purify me of all this abomination.”

He prayed, asking God to help him, to enter into him and cleanse him; and what he was praying for had happened already:  the God within him had awakened his consciousness.  He felt himself one with Him, and therefore felt not only the freedom, fulness and joy of life, but all the power of righteousness.  All, all the best that a man could do he felt capable of doing.

His eyes filled with tears as he was saying all this to himself, good and bad tears:  good because they were tears of joy at the awakening of the spiritual being within him, the being which had been asleep all these years; and bad tears because they were tears of tenderness to himself at his own goodness.

He felt hot, and went to the window and opened it.  The window opened into a garden.  It was a moonlit, quiet, fresh night; a vehicle rattled past, and then all was still.  The shadow of a tall poplar fell on the ground just opposite the window, and all the intricate pattern of its bare branches was clearly defined on the clean swept gravel.  To the left the roof of a coach-house shone white in the moonlight, in front the black shadow of the garden wall was visible through the tangled branches of the trees.

Nekhludoff gazed at the roof, the moonlit garden, and the shadows of the poplar, and drank in the fresh, invigorating air.

“How delightful, how delightful; oh, God, how delightful,” he said, meaning that which was going on in his soul.

CHAPTER XXIX.

MASLOVA IN PRISON.

Maslova reached her cell only at six in the evening, tired and footsore, having, unaccustomed as she was to walking, gone 10 miles on the stony road that day.  She was crushed by the unexpectedly severe sentence and tormented by hunger.  During the first interval of her trial, when the soldiers were eating bread and hard-boiled eggs in her presence, her mouth watered and she realised she was hungry, but considered it beneath her dignity to beg of them.  Three hours later the desire to eat had passed, and she felt only weak.  It was then she received the unexpected sentence.  At first she thought she had made a mistake; she could not imagine herself as a convict in Siberia, and could not believe what she heard.  But seeing the quiet, business-like faces of judges and jury, who heard this news as if it were perfectly natural and expected, she grew indignant, and proclaimed loudly to the whole Court that she was not guilty.  Finding that her cry was also taken as something natural and expected, and feeling incapable of altering matters, she was horror-struck and began to weep in despair,