The travellers fell asleep.  Afanasyevna and Sofya came up to the cart and began looking at Kuzka.

“The little orphan’s asleep,” said the old woman.  “He’s thin and frail, nothing but bones.  No mother and no one to care for him properly.”

“My Grishutka must be two years older,” said Sofya.  “Up at the factory he lives like a slave without his mother.  The foreman beats him, I dare say.  When I looked at this poor mite just now, I thought of my own Grishutka, and my heart went cold within me.”

A minute passed in silence.

“Doesn’t remember his mother, I suppose,” said the old woman.

“How could he remember?”

And big tears began dropping from Sofya’s eyes.

“He’s curled himself up like a cat,” she said, sobbing and laughing with tenderness and sorrow....  “Poor motherless mite!”

Kuzka started and opened his eyes.  He saw before him an ugly, wrinkled, tear-stained face, and beside it another, aged and toothless, with a sharp chin and hooked nose, and high above them the infinite sky with the flying clouds and the moon.  He cried out in fright, and Sofya, too, uttered a cry; both were answered by the echo, and a faint stir passed over the stifling air; a watchman tapped somewhere near, a dog barked.  Matvey Savitch muttered something in his sleep and turned over on the other side.

Late at night when Dyudya and the old woman and the neighbouring watchman were all asleep, Sofya went out to the gate and sat down on the bench.  She felt stifled and her head ached from weeping.  The street was a wide and long one; it stretched for nearly two miles to the right and as far to the left, and the end of it was out of sight.  The moon was now not over the yard, but behind the church.  One side of the street was flooded with moonlight, while the other side lay in black shadow.  The long shadows of the poplars and the starling-cotes stretched right across the street, while the church cast a broad shadow, black and terrible that enfolded Dyudya’s gates and half his house.  The street was still and deserted.  From time to time the strains of mu sic floated faintly from the end of the street—­Alyoshka, most likely, playing his concertina.

Someone moved in the shadow near the church enclosure, and Sofya could not make out whether it were a man or a cow, or perhaps merely a big bird rustling in the trees.  But then a figure stepped out of the shadow, halted, and said something in a man’s voice, then vanished down the turning by the church.  A little later, not three yards from the gate, another figure came into sight; it walked straight from the church to the gate and stopped short, seeing Sofya on the bench.

“Varvara, is that you?” said Sofya.

“And if it were?”

It was Varvara.  She stood still a minute, then came up to the bench and sat down.

“Where have you been?” asked Sofya.

Varvara made no answer.