ral effort of will-power he forced his fingers not to tremble,
his voice to be firm and distinct, his eyes to be calm. He saw nothing
about him; the voices came to him as through a mist, and it was to this
mist that he made his desperate efforts to answer firmly, to answer
loudly. But having answered, he immediately forgot question as well as
answer, and was again struggling with himself silently and terribly.
Death was disclosed in him so clearly that the judges avoided looking at
him. It was hard to define his age, as is the case with a corpse
which has begun to decompose. According to his passport, he was only
twenty-three years old. Once or twice Werner quietly touched his knee
with his hand, and each time Kashirin spoke shortly:

"Never mind!"

The most terrible sensation was when he was suddenly seized with an
insufferable desire to cry out, without words, the desperate cry of a
beast. He touched Werner quickly, and Werner, without lifting his eyes,
said softly:

"Never mind, Vasya. It will soon be over."

And embracing them all with a motherly, anxious look, the fifth
terrorist, Tanya Kovalchuk, was faint with alarm. She had never had any
children; she was still young and red-cheeked, just as Sergey Golovin,
but she seemed as a mother to all of them: so full of anxiety, of
boundless love were her looks, her smiles, her sighs. She paid not
the slightest attention to the trial, regarding it as though it were
something entirely irrelevant, and she listened only to the manner in
which the others were answering the questions, to hear whether the voice
was trembling, whether there was fear, whether it was necessary to give
water to any one.

She could not look at Vasya in her anguish and only wrung her fingers
silently. At Musya and Werner she gazed proudly and respectfully, and
she assumed a serious and concentrated expression, and then tried to
transfer her smile to Sergey Golovin.

"The dear boy is looking at the sky. Look, look, my darling!" she
thought about Golovin.

"And Vasya! What is it? My God, my God! What am I to do with him? If I
should speak to him I might make it still worse. He might suddenly start
to cry."

So like a calm pond at dawn, reflecting every hastening, passing cloud,
she reflected upon her full, gentle, kind face every swift sensation,
every thought of the other four. She did not give a single thought to
the fact that she, too, was upon trial, that she, too, would be hanged;
she w