When Savely returned two hours later, worn out and covered with snow, she was undressed and in bed.  Her eyes were closed, but from the slight tremor that ran over her face he guessed that she was not asleep.  On his way home he had vowed inwardly to wait till next day and not to touch her, but he could not resist a biting taunt at her.

“Your witchery was all in vain:  he’s gone off,” he said, grinning with malignant joy.

His wife remained mute, but her chin quivered.  Savely undressed slowly, clambered over his wife, and lay down next to the wall.

“To-morrow I’ll let Father Nikodim know what sort of wife you are!” he muttered, curling himself up.

Raissa turned her face to him and her eyes gleamed.

“The job’s enough for you, and you can look for a wife in the forest, blast you!” she said.  “I am no wife for you, a clumsy lout, a slug-a-bed, God forgive me!”

“Come, come... go to sleep!”

“How miserable I am!” sobbed his wife.  “If it weren’t for you, I might have married a merchant or some gentleman!  If it weren’t for you, I should love my husband now!  And you haven’t been buried in the snow, you haven’t been frozen on the highroad, you Herod!”

Raissa cried for a long time.  At last she drew a deep sigh and was still.  The storm still raged without.  Something wailed in the stove, in the chimney, outside the walls, and it seemed to Savely that the wailing was within him, in his ears.  This evening had completely confirmed him in his suspicions about his wife.  He no longer doubted that his wife, with the aid of the Evil One, controlled the winds and the post sledges.  But to add to his grief, this mysteriousness, this supernatural, weird power gave the woman beside him a peculiar, incomprehensible charm of which he had not been conscious before.  The fact that in his stupidity he unconsciously threw a poetic glamour over her made her seem, as it were, whiter, sleeker, more unapproachable.

“Witch!” he muttered indignantly.  “Tfoo, horrid creature!”

Yet, waiting till she was quiet and began breathing evenly, he touched her head with his finger... held her thick plait in his hand for a minute.  She did not feel it.  Then he grew bolder and stroked her neck.

“Leave off!” she shouted, and prodded him on the nose with her elbow with such violence that he saw stars before his eyes.

The pain in his nose was soon over, but the torture in his heart remained.

PEASANT WIVES

In the village of Reybuzh, just facing the church, stands a two-storeyed house with a stone foundation and an iron roof.  In the lower storey the owner himself, Filip Ivanov Kashin, nicknamed Dyudya, lives with his family, and on the upper floor, where it is apt to be very hot in summer and very cold in winter, they put up government officials, merchants, or landowners, who chance to be travelling that way.  Dyudya rents some bits of land, keeps a tavern on the highroad, does a trade in tar, honey, cattle, and jackdaws, and has already something like eight thousand roubles put by in the bank in the town.