He put on his best suit, which she brought him from the store-room. Instead of a button, she passed a ribbon through his shirt button-holes and tied it; she helped him to dress, and hurried Pete on, with feverish impatience to get the horses harnessed in a trice. She was all the time in rapid movement, and her heart cried out for gladness: her goodman would be absent for the whole day, and was to return late ... perhaps only near midnight! While she would remain alone!—And at dusk—at dusk—she could go out—out behind the haystack! Aha!... She exulted in her soul; her eyes beamed with laughter, she stretched and drew herself up; shocks as of tingling and burning electric fluid went through her with most exquisitely sweet torment.... And then, all at once and unexpectedly, a strange feeling of dread took hold of her, and a dead hush came over her soul, and she looked on, as one dazed, at Boryna, as he put on his cap and gave his orders to Vitek. “Oh, pray, pray, take me with you!” she whispered low. “But—but,” Boryna stammered in astonishment, “who will take your place at home?” “Yet take me.—It is St. Stephen’s feast to-day, and there is little to do. Take me; I feel so dejected here!” And she begged so hard that—much as he wondered at her whim—he made no further difficulties. A few minutes later, she was ready, and off they set from the hut, the sledge swaying and sweeping round with all the might of straining hocks and beating hoofs. CHAPTER VI “I thought,” he muttered sourly, “you’d been lost in some snow-drift!” “In such a storm as this, how could I go faster? I had to grope my way along, for the snow blew in my eyes so, I could not keep them open; and it drives along the roads so thick that it hides everything two paces away.” “Your mother at home?” “Surely; where else, in such villainous weather? She was at the Koziols, this morning. Magda is in a bad way, though, and like to go to the churchyard, ‘the priest’s cow-byre.’” So answered Yagna, shaking the snow from her clothes. “Any gossip abroad?” he inquired, chaffing her. “Go out and ask, and ye will know. I did not run thither to gossip.” “Do you know that the Squire is here?” “Here? In such a storm it were hard to keep a dog out of doors; and he has freely chosen to come?” “‘Who must, will go, even through storms of snow.’” “Yes, who must.” She smiled sceptically. “He himself promised; no one asked him,” Boryna answered sternly. Then he set aside a barrel hoop he was working at, and got up to look out at the window; but such a hurricane of snow filled the air, whirling and swirling outside, that neither trees nor fences were visible. “I think the snow is not coming down any more,” he added, more gently.