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He had nothing to tell her, but he invented something to say and whispered as he passed her: "Aunt told me that she would break her fast after the late mass." The young blood rushed up to Katusha's sweet face, as it always did when she looked at him. The black eyes, laughing and full of joy, gazed naively up and remained fixed on Nekhludoff. "I know," she said, with a smile.
"Here's daddy come," came the ringing accents of a child's voice, and a flaxen head appeared from behind Rintzeva, who, with Katusha's and Mary Pavlovna's help, was making a new garment for the child out of one of Rintzeva's own petticoats. "Yes, daughter, it's me," Bousovkin, the prisoner, said softly.
He heard Matrona Pavlovna snoring quietly, and was about to go on when she coughed and turned on her creaking bed, and his heart fell, and he stood immovable for about five minutes. When all was quiet and she began to snore peacefully again, he went on, trying to step on the boards that did not creak, and came to Katusha's door. There was no sound to be heard.
He passed the gang, which, with its grey cloaks and sheepskin coats, chains and manacles, stretched over three-quarters of a mile of the road. On the opposite side of the road Nekhludoff noticed Katusha's blue shawl, Vera Doukhova's black coat, and Simonson's crochet cap, white worsted stockings, with bands, like those of sandals, tied round him.
Katusha's life, and the scrum oozing from the nostrils of the corpse, and the eyes that protruded out of their sockets, and his own treatment of her all seemed to belong to the same order of things, and he felt surrounded and wholly absorbed by things of the same nature.
He broke the seal, and seeing a letter from Selenin and some official paper inside the envelope, he felt the blood rush to his face, and his heart stood still. It was the answer to Katusha's petition. What would that answer be? Nekhludoff glanced hurriedly through the letter, written in an illegibly small, hard, and cramped hand, and breathed a sigh of relief. The answer was a favourable one.
The whole of life seemed full of gladness. And she felt the same. But it was not only Katusha's presence that had this effect on Nekhludoff. When he received an unpleasant letter from his mother, or could not get on with his essay, or felt the unreasoning sadness that young people are often subject to, he had only to remember Katusha and that he should see her, and it all vanished.
Up to this time he had liked Katusha's looks, but the possibility of any nearer relations with her had never entered his mind. "Impossible to catch those two," said the merry young artist, whose turn it was to catch, and who could run very fast with his short, muscular legs. "You! And not catch us?" said Katusha. "One, two, three," and the artist clapped his hands.
There he stood, looking at Katusha's serious, suffering face, which betrayed the inner struggle of her soul, and he felt pity for her; but, strange though it may seem, this pity only confirmed him in his evil intention. He knocked at the window. She started as if she had received an electric shock, her whole body trembled, and a look of horror came into her face.
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