“So I told Pete more than once; but the fellow does not mind me.” She called the pigs and poultry round her, priding herself on their numbers; and then she told him about the field-work; what had been sown, and where, and how much of each crop. When she had finished, he said: “I can hardly think that you have done all this by yourself.” “For your sake, I could have done still more!” she whispered, overjoyed at his praise; and the whisper came hot from her heart. “You have backbone, Hanka ... and plenty of it too!—I did not expect it of you.” “I had to, and needs must when the devil drives.” After looking about the orchard, with its half-ripe cherries, and the plots of parsley and onions, and the young cabbage-plants, they came back; and as they passed the side where his father had lived he peeped in at the window. “And where’s Yagna?” he asked, seeing with surprise that the room was empty. “At her mother’s. I turned her out,” she replied in a firm voice, looking him full in the face. He knit his brows, pondered awhile, then lit a cigarette, and said quietly and with seeming indifference: “Dominikova is a bad animal; she will not be ousted without a lawsuit.” “I hear they both went to lodge a complaint yesterday.” “Well, well, ‘between complaint and sentence, there is a good long distance’; but we must consider things well, and not let her play us any tricks.” She told him how it had all come about—of course, omitting many a detail. He heard her out, put no question, and only frowned heavily. But when she handed him the paper, he gave a sarcastic laugh. “With that paper ye may as well ... why, ’tis worth absolutely naught!” “How so!—It is the very same paper your father gave her!” “What’s the use of a broken stick?—Had she annulled the deed at the notary’s, that would have been something. It was in mockery she flung it to you!” He gave a shrug, took little Peter on his arm, and made for the stile. “I am going to look at the fields and come back,” he said over his shoulder, and at the hint she stopped short, much as she had longed to go with him. As he passed the stack, now repaired and filled with new hay, he glanced at it from under heavy eyelids. “It was repaired by Matthew!” she called out to him from the stile where she stood. “The roof alone required some scores of straw trusses.” “Good, good!” he grunted in reply, and strode away through the potatoes along the pathway, uninterested in such trifles. The fields on that side of the village nearly all bore autumn-sown crops this year: so he met but few people, and those he met he saluted curtly, and passed on. But soon he walked more slowly, for Peter was beginning to feel heavy, and the hot still weather acted strangely upon him. He stopped to examine almost every field in particular. “Ha! that weed is simply choking the flax!” he cried, observing the patches of flax, azure-blue with flowers, but thickly strewn with the yellow blooms of some weed.