“Why should he?  He won’t.”  Breathing hard and rubbing her shoulder, which hurt, she looked up at him again, flushed a little and laughed.  “Don’t go away, dear heart,” she said; “I am dull alone.”

Yergunov looked into her eyes, hesitated, and put his arms round her; she did not resist.

“Come, no nonsense; let me go,” he begged her.  She did not speak.

“I heard you just now,” he said, “telling Merik that you love him.

“I dare say. . . .  My heart knows who it is I love.”

She put her finger on the key again, and said softly:  “Give me that.”

Yergunov unfastened the key and gave it to her.  She suddenly craned her neck and listened with a grave face, and her expression struck Yergunov as cold and cunning; he thought of his horse, and now easily pushed her aside and ran out into the yard.  In the shed a sleepy pig was grunting with lazy regularity and a cow was knocking her horn.  Yergunov lighted a match and saw the pig, and the cow, and the dogs, which rushed at him on all sides at seeing the light, but there was no trace of the horse.  Shouting and waving his arms at the dogs, stumbling over the drifts and sticking in the snow, he ran out at the gate and fell to gazing into the darkness.  He strained his eyes to the utmost, and saw only the snow flying and the snowflakes distinctly forming into all sorts of shapes; at one moment the white, laughing face of a corpse would peep out of the darkness, at the next a white horse would gallop by with an Amazon in a muslin dress upon it, at the next a string of white swans would fly overhead. . . .  Shaking with anger and cold, and not knowing what to do, Yergunov fired his revolver at the dogs, and did not hit one of them; then he rushed back to the house.

When he went into the entry he distinctly heard someone scurry out of the room and bang the door.  It was dark in the room.  Yergunov pushed against the door; it was locked.  Then, lighting match after match, he rushed back into the entry, from there into the kitchen, and from the kitchen into a little room where all the walls were hung with petticoats and dresses, where there was a smell of cornflowers and fennel, and a bedstead with a perfect mountain of pillows, standing in the corner by the stove; this must have been the old mother’s room.  From there he passed into another little room, and here he saw Lyubka.  She was lying on a chest, covered with a gay-coloured patchwork cotton quilt, pretending to be asleep.  A little ikon-lamp was burning in the corner above the pillow.

“Where is my horse?” Yergunov asked.

Lyubka did not stir.

“Where is my horse, I am asking you?” Yergunov repeated still more sternly, and he tore the quilt off her.  “I am asking you, she-devil!” he shouted.

She jumped up on her knees, and with one hand holding her shift and with the other trying to clutch the quilt, huddled against the wall . . . .  She looked at Yergunov with repulsion and terror in her eyes, and, like a wild beast in a trap, kept cunning watch on his faintest movement.