She sat down at the piano, and her strong, small hands tore the heart out of each wire.  There are some people who get farther into a piano than others, making the wires speak as with a voice.  Catrina Lanovitch had this trick.  She only played a Russian people-song—­a simple lay such as one may hear issuing from the door of any kabak on a summer evening.  But she infused a true Russian soul into it—­the soul that is cursed with a fatal power of dumb and patient endurance.  She did not sway from side to side as do some people who lose themselves in the intoxication of music.  But she sat quite upright, her sturdy, square shoulders motionless.  Her strange eyes were fixed with the stillness of distant contemplation.

Suddenly she stopped and leaped to her feet.  She did not go to the window, but stood listening beside the piano.  The beat of a horse’s hoofs on the narrow road was distinctly audible, hollow and sodden as is the sound of a wooden road.  It came nearer and nearer, and a certain unsteadiness indicated that the horse was tired.

“I thought he might have come,” she whispered, and she sat down breathlessly.

When the servant came into the room a few minutes later Catrina was at the piano.

“A letter, mademoiselle,” said the maid.

“Lay it on the table,” answered Catrina, without looking round.  She was playing the closing bars of a nocturne.

She rose slowly, turned, and seized the letter as a starving man seizes food.  There was something almost wolf-like in her eyes.

“Steinmetz,” she exclaimed, reading the address.  “Steinmetz.  Oh! why won’t he write to me?”

She tore open the letter, read it, and stood holding it in her hand, looking out over the trackless pine-woods with absorbed, speculative eyes.  The sun had just set.  The farthest ridge of pine-trees stood out like the teeth of a saw in black relief on the rosy sky.  Catrina Lanovitch watched the rosiness fade into pearly gray.

“Madame the Countess awaits mademoiselle for tea,” said the maid’s voice suddenly, in the gloom of the door-way.

“I will come.”

The village of Thors—­twenty miles farther down the river Oster, twenty miles nearer to the junction of that river with the Volga—­was little more than a hamlet in the days of which we write.  Some day, perhaps, the three hundred souls of Thors may increase and multiply—­some day when Russia is attacked by the railway fever.  For Thors is on the Chorno-Ziom—­the belt of black and fertile soil that runs right across the vast empire.

Karl Steinmetz, a dogged watcher of the Wandering Jew—­the deathless scoffer at our Lord’s agony, who shall never die, who shall leave cholera in his track wherever he may wander—­Karl Steinmetz knew that the Oster was in itself a Wandering Jew.  This river meandered through the lonesome country, bearing cholera germs within its waters.  Whenever Osterno had cholera it sent it down the river to Thors, and so on to the Volga.