“Perchance, too,” he added kindly, “Hanka may have something else for you besides.” “Had it not been for her, we should have died of starvation!” she declared, sobbing. “Yes, I’ll work for you whenever you may want me. May God reward you! I am not speaking for myself; I am accustomed to hunger. But my dear little mites are crying out: ‘Grandam, give us to eat!’—and there is naught for them! I tell you: to feed them, I would cut off my own arms, or steal things from the altar, and sell them to the Jew.” “Then do ye live once more with your children?” “Am I not their mother? Can I leave them in such misery? Every misfortune seems to have fallen on them this year. Their cow has died; all their potatoes have rotted (they even had to buy seed-potatoes); the gale blew their barn down; and, to crown all, my daughter-in-law has been ailing ever since her last child was born. They are all left to God’s mercy.” “Aye, but why? Because your Voytek always reeks of brandy and only cares for the tavern.” “If at times he has taken too much, ’twas misery drove him that way,” she said, eager in defence of her son. “Never, while he had work to do, did he even look in at the Jew’s. But to a poor man, every glass is reckoned as a crime.—Alas! the Lord has dealt with them bitterly, very bitterly.—Is it right He should thus dog the steps of a poor foolish lout? And for what? What harm has he done?” she muttered, raising to Heaven her eyes, full of indignant challenge. “But what! have ye not laid your curse on them?” Antek said, with strong significance. “Often and often ye have!” “Ah, was it possible that our Lord should ever have listened to my senseless outcries?” But she added, in a tone of secret uneasiness: “Even when a mother curses her children, her heart never really wishes them evil.—‘Wrath and woe make tongues go!’ Aye, indeed....” “Has your Voytek farmed out his meadow yet?” “The miller offered a thousand _zloty_ for it, but I would not allow it. What that wolf has once got in his grip, not the devil himself could wrest out of it!—And perhaps someone else might be found with the cash?” “It is surely a lovely meadow—can be mown twice a year. Had I only ready money just now!” He sighed, licking his lips with strong desire. “Matthias would have been glad to get it: it lies so close to Yagna’s land.” The name uttered gave him a start. He paused, however, and then inquired, with an indifferent look, his eyes wandering over the country-side: “How are they getting on at Dominikova’s?” But she guessed what was in his mind, and smiled with thin lips, drawing closer: “The place is a hell for them all! All there have funeral faces: they are chilled to the marrow with the gloom which fills it. They cry their eyes out, and live on, waiting upon God’s Providence. Yagna especially——”