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.”
“’Twere well, Nadia, to give me a list of these forbidden vocables.”
“I don’t know them all. However, you mustn’t use the word ‘revolution.’”
Wilfrid began now to understand why the officials of Kowno had confiscated from his small travelling library a book bearing the title of “The Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies.” Evidently it was regarded as a dangerous political work!
“Anything more?”