Sadly, Matthew didn't know enough Russian to get the joke, if there was one. He stared with more than his usual blankness at the intervening space between them, continuing to stand in just slightly the wrong place, his head cocked faintly backwards in the direction of the window beyond. Since the admonition to stop, he had not moved except to breathe and shift slightly on his heels. Matthew heard clearly the pad of James' finger as it slid across the shaped metal of the trigger, and his hidden eyes grew briefly sad.
The contact smoothed off into silence, and it became visible just how much Matthew had tensed as he let that nervous energy, the awkward preparation, show. This time Matthew's chin moved, re-positioning his ears more than his head, and he waited through James' silence with a look that held a faint cast of apology.
"Ay," he said. "I know what it is to hate, I do. Yet I was told once that to hate is more effort for me than 'tis upon that of the hated, and it is only the devil that wins." Here he shrugged. "Thou seemest to me an honorable man, with a soul yet heavy from past deeds. To repent is more a service to thyself than to God, in the same way, I think." Then, unaware at how much this sounded like a sermon, he moved in James' direction again, straight and not circuitous.
Matthew smiled a disturbingly angelic smile. "Dost thou wish me to pursue this woman, and find where she goes?"