The starosta spread out his hands.

“Your Excellency,” he answered, “I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

The starosta shrugged his narrow shoulders in cringing deprecation.

“Excellency, I do not know.  There is something in the village—­something in the whole country.  I know not what it is.  It is a feeling—­one cannot see it, one cannot define it; but it is there, like the gleam of water at the bottom of a deep well.  The moujiks are getting dangerous.  They will not speak to me.  I am suspected.  I am watched.”

His shifty eyes, like black beads, flitted from side to side as he spoke.  He was like a weasel at bay.  It was the face of a man who went in bodily fear.

“I will go with you down to the village now,” said Paul.  “Is there any excuse—­any illness?”

“Ah, Excellency,” replied the chief, “there is always that excuse.”

Paul looked at the clock.

“I will go now,” he said.  He began his simple preparations at once.

“There is dinner to be thought of,” suggested Steinmetz, with a resigned smile.  “It is half-past seven.”

“Dinner can wait,” replied Paul in English.  “You might tell the ladies that I have gone out, and will dine alone when I come back.”

Steinmetz shrugged his broad shoulders.

“I think you are a fool,” he said, “to go alone.  If they discover your identity they will tear you to pieces.”

“I am not afraid of them,” replied Paul, with his head in the medicine cupboard, “any more than I am afraid of a horse.  They are like horses; they do not know their own strength.”

“With this difference,” added Steinmetz, “that the moujik will one day make the discovery.  He is beginning to make it now.  The starosta is quite right, Paul.  There is something in the air.  It is about time that you took the ladies away from here and left me to manage it alone.”

“That time will never come again,” answered Paul.  “I am not going to leave you alone again.”

He was pushing his arms into the sleeves of the old brown coat reaching to his heels, a garment which commanded as much love and respect in Osterno as ever would an angel’s wing.

Steinmetz opened the drawer of his bureau and laid a revolver on the table.

“At all events,” he said, “you may as well have the wherewithal to make a fight of it, if the worst comes to the worst.”

“As you like,” answered Paul, slipping the fire-arm into his pocket.

The starosta moved away a pace or two.  He was essentially a man of peace.

Half an hour later it became known in the village that the Moscow doctor was in the house of one Ivan Krass, where he was prepared to see all patients who were now suffering from infectious complaints.  The door of this cottage was soon besieged by the sick and the idle, while the starosta stood in the door-way and kept order.

Within, in the one dwelling-room of the cottage, were assembled as picturesque and as unsavory a group as the most enthusiastic modern “slummer” could desire to see.