Savka said the last words with a smile, but they sent a chill to my heart.  In the village, near the furthest hut, Yakov was standing in the road, gazing fixedly at his returning wife.  He stood without stirring, and was as motionless as a post.  What was he thinking as he looked at her?  What words was he preparing to greet her with?  Agafya stood still a little while, looked round once more as though expecting help from us, and went on.  I have never seen anyone, drunk or sober, move as she did.  Agafya seemed to be shrivelled up by her husband’s eyes.  At one time she moved in zigzags, then she moved her feet up and down without going forward, bending her knees and stretching out her hands, then she staggered back.  When she had gone another hundred paces she looked round once more and sat down.

“You ought at least to hide behind a bush...”  I said to Savka.  “If the husband sees you...”

“He knows, anyway, who it is Agafya has come from....  The women don’t go to the kitchen garden at night for cabbages—­we all know that.”

I glanced at Savka’s face.  It was pale and puckered up with a look of fastidious pity such as one sees in the faces of people watching tortured animals.

“What’s fun for the cat is tears for the mouse...” he muttered.

Agafya suddenly jumped up, shook her head, and with a bold step went towards her husband.  She had evidently plucked up her courage and made up her mind.

AT CHRISTMAS TIME

I

“What shall I write?” said Yegor, and he dipped his pen in the ink.

Vasilisa had not seen her daughter for four years.  Her daughter Yefimya had gone after her wedding to Petersburg, had sent them two letters, and since then seemed to vanish out of their lives; there had been no sight nor sound of her.  And whether the old woman were milking her cow at dawn, or heating her stove, or dozing at night, she was always thinking of one and the same thing—­what was happening to Yefimya, whether she were alive out yonder.  She ought to have sent a letter, but the old father could not write, and there was no one to write.

But now Christmas had come, and Vasilisa could not bear it any longer, and went to the tavern to Yegor, the brother of the innkeeper’s wife, who had sat in the tavern doing nothing ever since he came back from the army; people said that he could write letters very well if he were properly paid.  Vasilisa talked to the cook at the tavern, then to the mistress of the house, then to Yegor himself.  They agreed upon fifteen kopecks.

And now—­it happened on the second day of the holidays, in the tavern kitchen—­Yegor was sitting at the table, holding the pen in his hand.  Vasilisa was standing before him, pondering with an expression of anxiety and woe on her face.  Pyotr, her husband, a very thin old man with a brownish bald patch, had come with her; he stood looking straight before him like a blind man.  On the stove a piece of pork was being braised in a saucepan; it was spurting and hissing, and seemed to be actually saying:  “Flu-flu-flu.”  It was stifling.