They greeted each other, and Boryna went so far, when the wagons were abreast, as to lean forwards, and say: “You will be late!” “Oh, we’ve time in plenty!” Yagna laughed in reply. When they had been passed, the organist’s son looked round at her several times, and asked at last: “Is that Dominikova’s Yagna?” “The same, yes,” Boryna returned, with his eyes upon her, a good way behind already. “I was not sure: it is a good couple of years since I last saw her.” “Ah, she was then tending kine. She’s very young still; but she has grown as stout as a clover-fed heifer.” “Aye, aye; comely she is; so well-favoured that every week messengers are sent to her with vodka—and a proposal.” “But she’ll none of them. The old woman thinks,” the organist’s wife whispered spitefully, “that a steward may come for her, and drive all the peasants away.” “Well, she would do, even for the wife of a thirty-five acres’ farmer.” “O Matthias, if you think so much of the lass, send proposers to her yourself,” she said with a laugh. Thenceforward Boryna spoke not one word. “You town-bred riff-raff, here become a big personage—who look under the tail of every peasant’s hen to see if there are eggs for you—who seek for money in every peasant’s fist—will you make a mock of me, a husbandman born! You leave Yagna alone!” So he thought, and looked straight in front of him, in a very ill humour indeed, at Dominikova’s cart, bright with the gleams of aprons thrown over kerchiefs, and now rapidly dropping astern; for Yanek was flogging the horses vigorously, and their hoofs made great holes in the mud. The good woman went on talking, but to no purpose. Boryna only nodded, or mumbled indistinctly, and stubbornly refrained from any utterance whatever. And no sooner had they reached the unspeakable pavement of the little town, than he got down, with thanks for the lift. “We shall be returning about nightfall,” she said, and asked whether he would care to go back with them. “Very much obliged to you,” he replied, “but I have horses of my own. People would jest—say I was applying for the post of organ-blower or assistant; and I can’t sing a note or learn how to use an extinguisher!” They went down a by-street, and he walked with swift steps up a main one, till he got to the market-place. It was a first-class fair, and the streets were already pretty well crowded. All the thoroughfares, squares, lanes and court-yards were full of people and vehicles and all sorts of country produce, like a flood into which human rivers were constantly flowing, with dense waves rolling through the narrow alleys and seeming about to bring the houses down, until it poured into the great square near the monastery. On the way townwards, there had been relatively little mud; but here, trodden and trampled by thousands of feet, it was ankle-deep, splashing in every direction from under the wheels of the carts.