All that her young companion told intensely interested
the old Siberian. "Nicholas Korpanoff!" said she.
"Tell me again about this Nicholas. I know only one man,
one alone, in whom such conduct would not have astonished me.
Nicholas Korpanoff! Was that really his name? Are you sure
of it, my daughter?"
"Why should he have deceived me in this," replied Nadia,
"when he deceived me in no other way?"
Moved, however, by a kind of presentiment, Marfa Strogoff put
questions upon questions to Nadia.
"You told me he was fearless, my daughter. You have proved
that he has been so?" asked she.
"Yes, fearless indeed!" replied Nadia.
"It was just what my son would have done," said Marfa to herself.
Then she resumed, "Did you not say that nothing stopped him,
nor astonished him; that he was so gentle in his strength that you
had a sister as well as a brother in him, and he watched over you
like a mother?"
"Yes, yes," said Nadia. "Brother, sister, mother--he has been
all to me!"
"And defended you like a lion?"
"A lion indeed!" replied Nadia. "A lion, a hero!"
"My son, my son!" thought the old Siberian. "But you said, however,
that he bore a terrible insult at that post-house in Ichim?"
"He did bear it," answered Nadia, looking down.
"He bore it!" murmured Marfa, shuddering.
"Mother, mother," cried Nadia, "do not blame him! He had a secret.
A secret of which God alone is as yet the judge!"
"And," said Marfa, raising her head and looking at Nadia as though
she would read the depths of her heart, "in that hour of humiliation
did you not despise this Nicholas Korpanoff?"
"I admired without understanding him," replied the girl.
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