Joseph saw the dog no longer. His eyes were riveted on the girl. She seemed to him like an angel taken out of a Christmas play, or a spirit from a Festival of the Three Kings—in truth she might have been one of those beautiful figures come to life out of the wondrous stained glass windows in the church. Her hair was light—Joseph’s was dark. Her skin was as white as the finest linen, her eyes as blue as the skies above the Vistula; she wore a cloaklike garment of red that fell from her shoulders to her ankles and was girdled at the waist. It was embroidered in blue, with lace at neck and wrists; in front it did not meet completely but showed the second garment that she wore beneath, a mantle of blue that fell in folds even below the outer coat. And as she looked up, the country boy thought that he had never seen anything prettier on earth—so daintily she tripped along that she seemed to walk on clouds. Then for a moment he looked down at his hands, dirty, hard, and grimy; he looked at his clothes and found them dusty and worn after the long journey. But if he had been in heaven at the sight of the girl, he came back to earth quickly. For the Tartar boy with the dog and the man in black with the girl were close together at the crossing of the roads when suddenly the maddened dog turned desperately at bay upon his tormentor and crouched for a powerful spring. Joseph shouted and rushed forward just as the dog leaped. The Tartar boy dropped the leather thong in a flash and darted down the walk out of reach of the dog’s jaws, but leaving directly in his path the man in black and the girl Blind with fury the dog sprang again, and in an instant he would have come down upon the girl who happened to be on the outside, had not Joseph at the same moment leaped and caught at the dog’s heavy collar. He had dealt with dogs many times in the Ukraine, and he knew that no dog is vicious if healthy and well treated; therefore there had been no fear in this effort that he made, save for the peril, perhaps, that the dog might mistake him for the boy who had been beating him, and sink his teeth into his flesh. His fingers caught the collar squarely. The grip held, and he went hurtling through the air like the tail of a skyrocket, as the dog’s leap, weighted by this unexpected load, fell short, and the girl drew back with a cry. But Joseph and the infuriated animal went rolling to and fro in a wild embrace on the hard surface of the road, he striving to make the beast pay attention to his words, the dog only becoming more and more frightened. But the boy knew, after the first second when all depended upon whether his grip held or not, that everything was safe and he could successfully avoid the paws and teeth of the dog. Thus at a favorable moment he released his hold quickly upon the animal’s collar, and scrambled to his feet, while a very dusty and possibly ashamed wolf dog tore off like a streak of lightning in the direction of the Franciscans’ church.