At home, too, things were not quite right. Hanka was distressed and tearful, for little Peter lay sick of a burning fever, and she had been forced to call in Yagustynka to fumigate him. She came just at supper-time, sat by the fire, looked furtively about her, and would have liked to gossip very much, but that they received her attempts very coldly; and so she presently set to trying her healing powers on the boy. “I am off to the mill,” Antek said, taking his cap; “unless I see the barley ground myself, it never will be done.” “Could not Father go in your stead?” “I shall be far more likely to get it.”—He went off in a hurry, ill-humoured, out of sorts, tossed about like a solitary tree in a storm. Besides, everything at home enraged him—especially those prying ferret eyes of Yagustynka. The evening was still and not frosty, with but few stars to be seen—only one or two, twinkling far away as through a veil. The wind blew from the woods, with a dull humming murmur, betokening a change of weather. Dogs barked dispersedly about the hamlet, smoke trailed along the road, and the air, though bleak, was damp. Christmas being at hand, there were plenty of people at the mill. Those whose corn was being ground waited in the passage; the others stayed in the room of the miller’s man. These formed a circle round Matthew, who was telling them something very funny, at which they every now and then burst into laughter. Antek did not care to cross the threshold, and went out to look for Franek at the mill. “He is on the dam,” they said, “squabbling with Magda—you know—the wench the organist turned out.” “The miller,” another peasant told him, “has threatened to send him away, if he is ever again seen in the mill with Magda; for she used to spend her nights there. But, poor thing! where else has she to go?” And someone else added, jestingly: “‘What in March we pursue, in November we rue!’” Antek sat down to wait, close to the place where the finest flour was ground, and opposite to the half-open door of the waiting-room. There he could discern Matthew’s shoulders, and the heads of the others all turned towards him and intent on what he was telling them. But for the clatter of the wheels, he could have even made out what was said, though he had no curiosity that way. He threw himself on to some sacks of corn, and presently, out of sheer dejection and weariness, began to doze. The mill clattered away, flapping, throbbing, and in full activity in every one of its compartments; the wheels beat as if a hundred washerwomen were all using their bats with might and main; the water swirled past them with a bubbling hullabaloo and, churned up into boiling foam and snowy flakes, rushed on to the river.