The spinning-wheel hummed busily, monotonously, tranquilly. Night, with frozen face, looked in at the window, and rattled at the panes, and sighed, pressing close against the wall. The cold came creeping out of the corners, caught at her feet, spread itself in hoary blotches over the clay floor; crickets struck up their ditty, somewhere behind the hearth, and only held their peace when either of the children cried out in his sleep or turned in his bed. Yet more intense grew the frost, clutching all things and pressing them in his iron claws: many a time did the planks overhead crack and creak, and fissures were cloven in the old bulging walls with a noise like a pistol-shot, and fibres in some beam broke, with a rull report. Surely the cold had penetrated even to the house-foundations; they shuddered at times, it seemed, with the pain of it, and the hut itself shrank together, crouching and quaking in the dreadful frost. “Why did the thought of this never come to me? Aye, she—so well-favoured, so well-knit, so comely to behold! And I—a poor thin creature, merely skin and bones! Have I the power to attract him? dare I even try? If I should give my heart’s blood, it were naught: he cares no whit for me. What am I to him?” Helplessness, still but torturing—how cruelly torturing!—now took possession of all her being. She was even beyond shedding tears. She felt as if she were a shrub that the frost is killing, that is as unable to avoid its doom as to cry for help or to protect itself: anguish was riving her soul as the frost rives the shrub. Resting her head on her wheel, she dropped her hands and looked out into vacancy, musing on her lot. Long, long did her reverie last, with only at times a few burning tears falling from her heavy eyelids on to the wool, there to freeze into a rosary of anguish—tears, as it were, of blood. The next day she rose somewhat calmer. This was of course; the storm had had time to blow over. What the miller said might or might not be true; but should she droop and complain, now that everything was on her shoulders—the children, and the house matters, and all the trouble and woe? Who would see to things, unless she did? She knelt down before our Lady of Sorrows, and prayed fervently; and, begging our Lord to set things to rights, she made a vow that she would go on foot to Chenstohova in the spring, and have three masses said, and—as soon as she should be able—take a great lump of wax to the church for tapers to be made of it. Greatly relieved by this vow, she was able to do plenty of spinning; but the day, though bright and sunny, seemed immeasurably lengthy to her, and her anxiety about Antek increased. He came at last, but only in the evening, at supper-time, and looking so worn and subdued, and greeting her so kindly! He had bought some rolls for the little ones.