“Of what new thing has he been yelping?” was his contemptuous answer. “He says you stir folk up against the manor, and that the gendarmes ought to arrest you.” “Let him but try! Ere they get hold of me, I would make such a ‘Red Cock’ perch on his roof, that his place would burn down to the ground,” he replied in a great rage. She at once ran to tell the old man, who thought the news over for a time, and then remarked: “’Tis like him, the villain! He is the very man to do such a thing.” He said no more, not wishing to take counsel with a woman; but to Roch, who came in the evening, he told all. “Do not believe whatever Yagustynka says: she is an evil-minded beldame.” “Yes, it may be all a falsehood: yet such things have been. Old Prychek burnt his father-in-law’s hut down for dealing unjustly by him in dividing the land. True, he went to prison, but he burnt it down.... And Antek may do the same. And he must have said something; she could not have made it all up.” Roch, who was a kind-hearted man, felt greatly pained, and tried to advise him. “Make it up. Let him have a little land for himself: to live, he needs the wherewithal. Besides, that would steady him, and leave him without excuse for quarrels and threats.” “No! Were I even to be quite ruined—made a beggar—no! Beg I may, but, so long as I live, not one inch of my land will I give up.... That he struck me and used me shamefully, I could forgive, though hardly and with pain; but should he attempt such a thing as this...!” “Is it meet to take the tattle of a gossip so to heart?” “I do not believe it, not I!—But what maddens me, what makes my blood run cold, is that it _might_ be true!” He sat with fists clenched, motionless and numb, at the bare possibility of so heinous an act. He had no proof of Yagna’s guilt, nay, he felt really sure she was innocent. But he shrewdly guessed that in his son’s hatred for him there was more than mere resentment for the land withheld; that the wild reckless look he had seen in Antek’s eyes came from some other cause. And he, too, was instantly aware of the same feeling within himself—of cold, revengeful, implacable hate. He turned to Roch, and muttered: “There is not room enough in Lipka for us twain!” “What—what can ye mean?” Roch cried in alarm. “God forbid he fall into my hands, if I seize him in the act!” Roch did his best to calm him and bring him round, but to no purpose. “Ah, he would burn me out, would he?—That remains to be seen!”