Immediately the company pressed around him with groans and ejaculations, and Gubin alone continued to harness the pony with swift and dexterous hands--saying to me through his teeth as he did so, and without looking at anyone: "That is how those wretched folk ALWAYS defer things until too late." The next person to present herself at the entrance gates was a beggar-woman. Screwing up her eyes in a furtive manner, she droned: "For the sake of Lord Je-e-esus!" "God will give you alms! God will give you alms!" was Nadezhda's reply as, turning pale, she flung out her arms in the old woman's direction. "You see, a terrible thing has happened--our timber lands have caught fire. You must come again later." Upon that Peter's bulky form (which had entirely filled the window from which it had been leaning), disappeared with a jerk, and in its stead there came into view the figure of a woman. Said she contemptuously: "See the visitation with which God has tried us, you men of faint hearts and indolent hands!" The woman's hair was grey at the temples, and had resting upon it a silken cap which so kept changing colour in the sunlight as to convey to one the impression that her head was bonneted with steel, while in her face, picturesque but dark (seemingly blackened with smoke), there gleamed two pupil-less blue eyes of a kind which I had never before beheld. "Fools," she continued, "how often have I not pointed out to you the necessity of cutting a wider space between the timber and the cemetery?" From a furrow above the woman's small but prominent nose, a pair of heavy brows extended to temples that were silvered over. As she spoke there fell a strange silence amid which save for the pony's pawing of the mire no sound mingled with the sarcastic reproaches of the deep, almost masculine voice. "That again is the mother-in-law," was my inward reflection. Gubin finished the harnessing--then said to Jonah in the tone of a superior addressing a servant: "Go in and dress yourself, you object!" Nevertheless, the Birkins drove out of the yard precisely as they were, while the peasant mounted his belathered steed and followed them at a trot; and the elderly lady disappeared from the window, leaving its panes even darker and blacker than they had previously been. Gubin, slip-slopping through the puddles with bare feet, said to me with a sharp glance as he moved to shut the entrance gates: "I presume that I can now take in hand the little affair of which you know." "Yakov!" at this juncture someone shouted from the house. Gubin straightened himself a la militaire. "Yes, I am coming," he replied. Whereafter, padding on bare soles, he ascended the steps. Nadezhda, standing at their top, turned away with a frown of repulsion at his approach, and nodded and beckoned to myself. "What has Yakov said to you?" she inquired "He has been reproaching me." "Reproaching you for what?" "For having spoken to you." She heaved a sigh.