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 was entirely indifferent to it. It was in her
house that the bombs and the dynamite had been discovered, and,
strange though it may seem, it was she who had met the police with
pistol-shots and had wounded one of the detectives in the head.