“Antek may be here at any moment!” she cried from the door-step. Boryna was lying with eyes fixed on a lamp that smoked above the fire-place. She whispered in Boryna’s ear: “He has been released to-day, Roch is awaiting him,” and her beaming eyes watched him to see if he had understood. It seemed not: he neither moved nor looked at her. “He may be in the village by now. Belike it is so,” she thought, as she ran out every now and then to see.—So sure was she of his return, so agitated with her long wait, that she spoke to herself, walking unsteadily as one drunk. To the darkness she talked about her hopes, and confided in the cattle as she milked them, informing them all that their master was coming back. She waited on.—But every minute was wearing out her strength and her patience. Night was there, the village abed. Back from her mother’s, Yagna had gone to rest at once. All in the house were sleeping presently. Hanka still watched outside the hut, and far into the night; but at last, exhausted with weariness and crying, she too put out the light and lay down. The whole land was now plunged in the deep stillness of repose. The village lights had gone out one by one, like eyes that close in slumber. The moon rolled up the soaring black-blue sky, sown with a twinkling dust of stars, and rose higher and higher, as a bird that wings its way athwart the void on silver pinions. The scattered clouds slept, huddled up into balls of soft white down; whilst on the earth all creatures lay quiet, wearied out and lost in sleep. Only a bird sang sweet exuberant lays from time to time; only the waters whispered drowsily; and the trees the moonlight bathed stirred now and again, as if they dreamed of day. Sometimes a dog growled, or the night-jar flapped its wings as it passed by; and low earth-clinging vapours now began to wrap the fields, but slowly, as a tired-out mother wraps her child. The sounds of quiet breathing rose from the almost invisible orchards and buildings, about which the people lay in the open air, trusting to the mildness of the night. In Boryna’s room as well, sleep and tranquillity prevailed, except for the _cree-cree-cree_ of the cricket on the hearth, and Yagna’s breaths, fluttering like a butterfly’s wings. It must have been at some time in the small hours (the first cock was crowing already) that Boryna began to move, the moon at the same time shining through the window-panes, and pouring on to his face its cold though seething torrents of silvery splendour. Sitting up in bed, and clearing his throat, he attempted to call out, but could utter no other sound than a gurgle. Thus he sat for a time, looking round with a vacant stare, and fumbling with his fingers in the light of his coverlet, as though he thought to grasp that luminous stream of moonbeams that struck his eyes. “Day has come.... It is time,” he mumbled at last, standing erect upon the floor.