“Let my wife,” he thought, “see to the children.”—What stung him above all the rest was the utter injustice shown to him. This he felt, continually more inflamed, as the rubbed sting of a nettle. What! In but three weeks, all the hamlet had come to look upon him as though he were an unknown intruder. No one spoke to him, no one looked in at his door, nobody had even a word of kind greeting for him. He felt himself an outlaw. Well, if they did not come, he was not the man to beg them. But neither would he hide in a corner—far less yield an inch of the way to any. If they cared to have a fight, why, then, let them have it!... But now, why was all this? Because he had fought his father?—Aha! was that unheard of in Lipka? Did not Joseph Vahnik fight his father every other day? Had not Staho Ploshka broken his father’s leg? And yet no one had a word of blame for either! No, it was only he they were shocked at. Of course: “Whom God favours, His saints favour too”; and Boryna was as a god in Lipka! All that time, breathing only revenge and the thought of it, he had lived on in a fever of excitement. He did not take to work, lost thought of his poverty, forgot all about the morrow: broken down after the agony gone through, he merely crawled hither and thither—a self-tormentor everywhere. Now and again he would rise in the night, to go about and roam along the roads or crouch hidden in dark corners, dreaming of vengeance, and swearing that he would never forgive. They took breakfast together without one word; and he sat with eyes of bewilderment, ruminating the past—thorny bitter provender, hard to chew! By now the day was getting on, and the fire had gone out. A cold whitish light from the snows outside shone through the partly thawed panes: the chilly dismal glare lit up every nook and showed the room in all its wretched nakedness. Heavens! By the side of such a hut, Boryna’s cabin was a mansion. Nay, any of his father’s outhouses, even the cow-byre, was fitter for human abode. It was a foul sty, not a dwelling-place; a heap of rotted logs, dried dung, worthless rubbish! Not a single board to cover the bare ground, whose clay was honeycombed with holes filled up with frozen mud and sweepings, whence an odour worse than a manure-heap exhaled whenever the fire-place warmed the room. Above this quag of a floor rose the walls, warped and mouldy down which the damp trickled, and in whose dark corners the Frost shook his hoary beard: walls with numberless holes, stopped with clay—or even, in some places, straw and cow-dung. The low ceiling hung down like a torn old sieve; there were fewer boards in it than holes, stopped with bundles of straw. Only the furniture and household utensils, together with the holy images on the walls, to some extent concealed this state of dire destitution; whilst the great press, and the horizontal pole across the room on which the clothes were hung, hid the wickerwork partition that separated the room from the byre....