Thus advised, Wilfrid put off his cross-examination of the yamchik till the morning, and the conversation flowed into other channels. “Are you a _vitch_ or an _off_?” asked Nadia, suddenly. “I am not quite sure that I understand.” “Why, look you, my father being the son of one Peter, is Boris Petroff. Now if he were a boyar he would be Boris Petrovitch.” “I see. Well, I suppose I must put myself down among the _vitches_, for I am a nobleman in my own country.” Nadia’s face fell when she heard this. In a voice that seemed to savour of resentment, she asked:— “How many souls have you?” “We in England are limited to one. Is it different in Russia?” “One!” echoed Nadia. “Some of our great boyars have ten thousand souls.” “They must take an unconscionable time in dying! And how many has Nadia?” “None,” replied the girl with a flash of her eyes as if detecting some hidden insult in the question. “We are souls ourselves, my father and I.” “It is the fashion of our boyars,” explained Boris, “to call their serfs ‘souls.’” “A good name,” added Nadia in a bitter tone, “for they have us, body as well as soul.” “And there are twenty million like us,” said Boris. It came upon Wilfrid as a painful shock to learn that this dignified innkeeper and his pretty daughter were serfs. That serfage existed in Russia was, of course, no news to him, but it had existed as something remote, and therefore as shadowy as the helotry of ancient Sparta. It was a very different thing to be brought vividly face to face with the system, to know that Boris, head man of the village, the lessee of a government post-house, and therefore himself a master of servants and the owner of many roubles, was of no account in the eye of the law. He and Nadia could be summoned back at any time to their lord’s estate, clothed in peasant attire, put to degrading tasks, and, like domestic animals, could be whipped or sold at the pleasure of their owner. No wonder, with such fears as these always present to their mind, that Boris should wear an habitual look of melancholy, and that Nadia’s flashes of liveliness should alternate with moods of gloom! Now if Wilfrid had been some blockhead of a Russian boyar he would have disdained all further conversation with the innkeeper and his daughter, but being an English gentleman it never occurred to him that he was losing caste by conversing with a serf, and so he continued to talk on, and under his sympathetic words Nadia seemed to brighten again. “Do you know,” she remarked, looking up with a half-smile, “that you have been talking treason? You have used the word ‘free’ several times. It’s a prohibited word.” “Prohibited?” “I do not jest, gospodin. The Czar Paul would regulate the language of his people, so he has issued a ukase forbidding the utterance of certain words. Among such come ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty.’” “The devil!” muttered Wilfrid. “You may say that. That’s not a prohibited word.”