In short, he was rolling swiftly to his destruction down a precipitous hill. All Lipka had their eyes upon him—eyes of suspicion and apprehension. As to the fire, indeed, they were divided in opinion; but they saw with their own eyes the deeds he undoubtedly did, and their animosity increased daily; besides, the smith was always inciting them against him. Even his former friends soon began to hold aloof from him; but to Antek, blinded by the lust of revenge, that was all one. And over and above this, as if to spite all men, he continued his relations with Yagna. Was it love that attracted him? or what was it? God knows: but they met in Dominikova’s barn: without her knowledge, indeed, but willingly abetted by Simon, who hoped that Antek would help him to get Nastka for his wife. Those meetings were unwillingly consented to by Yagna. With the wales of her husband’s castigation still fresh upon her, she had no mind for love-making; but she feared Antek, who had sent her word that, unless she came at every call of his, he would go to her hut, and in broad daylight and in public administer a chastisement yet more severe than Boryna’s had been! As the saying is: “For the authors of their fall, sinners have no love at all”: but she feared his threat, and was forced to go. This state of things, however, did not last long. The second day of Lent, Simon came in haste to the tavern and, taking Antek aside, told him that Yagna had just been reconciled to her goodman and returned to his cabin. If a club had crashed down on his skull, it would not have stunned him more than this news. She had met him the very day before, and had said no word of this. “So! she left me in the dark!” he thought, and hurried away to Boryna’s as soon as evening had fallen. He prowled for a long time about his father’s premises, looking for her and waiting by the stile; but she was not to be seen. This irritated him so violently that he boldly pulled up a stake and entered the enclosure, ready to proceed to any extremity—even to go into the hut; in fact, he was in the passage, with his hand on the latch ... when an unknown feeling of dread drove him from the door! His father’s face had come before him with such sudden vividness that he started back in terror from that mental image. What it was that had come over him, and why he had quailed now again, just as on that former night beside the pond, he was all his life unable to understand. On the following days too, he got no sight of her, although he watched by the stile, and lurked about there for whole evenings together, like a wolf. Sunday come round, and he waited for a long while in front of the church: but she did not appear. The thought struck him that he might perhaps meet her at Vespers, and get speech with her somehow. So he went.