“The ‘wherefore’ is there still; ye can see it; it will wait.” “A curse on your saucy tongue!—Vee-o, old fellow, Vee-o!” But now the horses went slower, foam-flecked and worn out. He himself, stripped to his shirt and drawers, was perspiring profusely, and his hands too were feeling the stress of the work. So that, on perceiving Yuzka, he cried out very heartily: “Good now, ’twas high time ye came; we are all famishing!” He finished the furrow up to the pine-wood, took the horses from the plough and turned them loose to graze on the verdant road by the forest: then, flinging himself down at the border of the wood, ate like a ravenous wolf, Yuzka all the time chattering away until he had enough of it. “Let me be.—I care naught for your tittle-tattle,” he said peevishly, and she, answering as peevishly back, ran off to pluck berries in the wood. The pine-forest was quiet, dried up, aromatically scented, and, as it were, dying in the sun’s fierce outpour. Only a very little verdure was to be seen, and out of its depths there blew a breeze laden with resinous fragrance, and carrying on its wings the warbling of birds. Antek, stretched out on the grass, lit a cigarette and, looking into the distance, saw, as through a thickening fog, the Squire on horseback, leaping across the Podlesie fields; and some men with him, bearing poles for land-measuring. Huge pines, with trunks as of red copper, rose above him, flinging down wavy and slumberous shadows. He would presently have fallen fast asleep, had it not been for the quick clatter of a wagon—the organist’s servant, carting trunks to the sawmill—and then the sound of the familiar greeting: “Praised be Jesus Christ!” One by one, the _Komorniki_ were coming home from the forest, each with a load of firewood on her shoulders. At the very end of the file, Yagustynka dragged herself along, bowed almost to the ground beneath her burden. “Rest ye here.—Why, your eyes are almost starting from their sockets.” She seated herself opposite him, leaning her load against a tree, and scarce able to breathe. “Such labour is not for you,” he told her with compassion. “Yes: I feel quite crushed now,” she replied. “Lay those heaps closer, closer!” he cried to his farm-servant Pete, and went on: “Why does not someone take your place?” She answered only with a surly look, and turned away her red eyes full of anguish. “Ye are now so changed!—Ye give way so.... Quite another woman.” “‘Even a flint will break under the hammer,’” she moaned, hanging her head. “And: ‘Suffering consumes man faster than rust eats iron.’” “The present season is hard even for well-to-do farmers.” “Hard! Let none talk of times being hard, so long as he has wild marjoram to eat, cooked with bran.” “Good heavens! come round this evening: we shall find two or three bushels of potatoes for you still. When harvest comes, ye can work the price out.” She broke down in a fit of crying, and could hardly speak to thank him.