risoners. 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.

"I have been talking with auntie, dear, and we thought that they might
discharge you at once. They say it happens. And they sometimes give
you money, if you strike the right time," the watch-woman started in a
singing voice. "What ill-luck! It seems we were wrong. God has His own
way, dear," she went on in her