They talked matters over very quietly and very long. Hanka meantime went about the hut, shaking up the bedding, providing the pillows with clean slips, and making her ablutions as for some great solemnity; combing her hair by the window, and peeping out at the two men with growing impatience. She listened attentively, too, to the smith, who dissuaded Antek from taking up such a burden, since he never could manage the peasants, and the Squire was against him. “That’s false!” she called out to him through the window. “He offered to stand bail for you in court.” “If ye know so much more about it, then let’s drop the matter,” he cried, surly as a dog. Antek rose, yawning drowsily. “But,” his visitor concluded, “I’ll just wind up with this: you are only at liberty till your trial; and who knows how things will go with you then? In such a position, how can you meddle with other folk’s affairs?” Antek sat down again, and was lost in a brown study. The smith did not wait for his answer, but went home. Hanka more than once looked out at Antek, but he did not notice her. She at last called him in a tone of timid pleading: “Come, Antek, ’tis bedtime; you must be very weary.” “Coming, Hanka, coming!” he said, rising heavily. She began to say her evening prayers with tremulous lips, while she undressed in haste. But he went in, sorely troubled, and thinking: “What shall I do if I am sent to Siberia?” CHAPTER V “Pete, bring firewood in!” Hanka called out from the cabin-door. She was covered with flour and very untidy with bread-making. A big fire roared in the baking-oven. She raked the coals to spread them out, and hastened to roll the dough and shape it into loaves, which she carried out into the passage upon a board that she set in the sunshine, for them to rise more quickly. She bustled about in a great hurry, for the dough was almost overbrimming the big kneading-trough, covered with bedding for warmth. “Yuzka! more wood on the fire; one end of the oven is almost black!” But no Yuzka was at hand, and Pete did not hasten to obey. He was loading dung on a cart, heaping and pressing it down, keeping up meanwhile a conversation with the blind _Dziad_, who was occupied in making ropes of straw outside the barn. The afternoon sun was so hot that the walls exuded liquid resin, and the wind blew like the blast from an oven, making every movement wearisome. The flies, too, hummed in myriads over the cart, and the horses, assailed, and maddened by them, came near breaking their halters, and perhaps their legs, in pulling and straining to avoid their bites.