"Well, that can be done. We have not made such small shoes, but we can do it. We can make sharp-edged shoes, or turnover shoes on linen. Mikháyla is my master." Semén looked around at Mikháyla, and he saw that Mikháyla had put away his work and was sitting and gazing at the girls. And Semén marvelled at Mikháyla. Indeed, the girls were pretty: black-eyed, chubby, ruddy-faced, and the fur coats and shawls which they had on were fine; but still Semén could not make out why he was gazing at them as though they were friends of his. Semén marvelled, and began to talk with the woman and to bargain. They came to an agreement, and he took the measures. The woman took the lame girl on her knees, and said: "For this girl take two measures: make one shoe for the lame foot, and three for the sound foot. They have the same size of feet, exactly alike. They are twins." Semén took the measure, and he said about the lame girl: "What has made her lame? She is such a pretty girl. Was she born this way?" "No, her mother crushed her." Matréna broke in,--she wanted to know who the woman was, and whose the children were, and so she said: "Are you not their mother?" "I am not their mother, nor their kin, housewife! I am a stranger to them: I have adopted them." "Not your children! How you care for them!" "Why should I not care for them? I nursed them with my own breast. I had a child of my own, but God took him away. I did not care for him so much as I have cared for them." "Whose are they, then?" IX. The woman began to talk, and said: "It was six years ago that these orphans lost their parents in one week: their father was buried on a Tuesday, and their mother died on Friday. These orphans were born three days after their father's death, and their mother did not live a day. At that time I was living with my husband in the village. We were their neighbours, our yard joining theirs. Their father was a lonely man; he worked in the forest. They dropped a tree on him, and it fell across his body and squeezed out his entrails. They had barely brought him home, when he gave up his soul to God, and that same week his wife bore twins,--these girls. The woman was poor and alone; she had neither old woman nor girl with her. "Alone she bore them, and alone she died.