No, that would have been too loathsome to her. Yet her present state was growing steadily more and more insupportable, and her craving for something new—she knew not what—increased as steadily. She gave Boryna spite for spite. Nevertheless, she lived in continual terror, oppressed by such a sense of injustice and such bitter sorrow that she often wept for whole nights, watering her pillow with tears; while by day those perpetual brawls and conflicts were not infrequently so hateful to her that she only dreamed of fleeing away somewhither—far, far away! Somewhither! Aye, but whither? Yes, the world stretched wide around her; but that world—it was such an appalling, unknown, unfathomable vagueness that the mere thought of it frightened her to death. It was this which still drew her towards Antek, though what she felt was not so much love as terror and despair. In that fearful night, when she had fled to her mother’s, something within her had burst and perished, so to speak; and now she could no longer fly to him with her whole heart, as she had done before; no more could she run to him at every call with joyfully beating heart. She went only from a sense of necessity—because the cabin was dull and wearisome, because she hated her husband—because she fancied that her former immense love might perhaps come to life again. In her inmost heart she felt bitter against him. Her present wretched position, the hard life she was leading now, her blighted reputation—all were due to him; and, moreover, she realized the fact that he was not that which she had adored, and she knew the fierce pangs of disenchantment and disillusion. He had formerly seemed to her quite another being—one whose fondness lifted her up to heaven, whose kindness overmastered her—the sweetest, dearest being in all the world. And now she saw he was just the same as any other peasant. Worse, indeed; for she was more afraid of him than even of her husband. He frightened her by his dark moods, by his fits of desolation, and, above all, by his reckless violence. He made her tremble, for he was, in her eyes, wild and fierce as a forest outlaw. Why, the priest himself had rebuked him publicly in church; the whole village had shrank away from him, and now pointed him out as the worst amongst them; and there proceeded out of him such an exhalation of mortal sin that the mere sound of his voice often made her faint with dread: it seemed to her as though Satan dwelt in him, and as if around him there hovered all the host of hell. At those moments she had such impressions as when his Reverence told the people about the awful torments of the lost!