And Laskowicz in the course of time issued further commands from his room which reached no one's knowledge. A strange thing! Inwardly something was telling him with sober, almost absolute certainty that the maid would not come and he nevertheless believed that she ought to have come. Not until a long time elapsed, did the consciousness dawn upon him that if she did not come, then he, together with his hypnotism, played the rôle of an addle-pated fool. Finally fatigue, disaffection, and anger at himself gripped him. Sleep irrevocably left him. Hour flew after hour. In the east the sky was deepening and it was becoming green. Soon the rosy lower border was striped with the transparent riband of dawn. The young student, not undressing himself at all, opened the window to breathe the bracing morning air. In the garden the first chirp of the birds began, and from the direction of the not distant pond, with the odor of the acacias, came the cries of herons and the subdued, as if yet sleepy, quacks of the wild ducks. After a while the sweep of the well creaked in the village. It then occurred to Laskowicz that this was the last daybreak he was to behold in Jastrzeb; that on the morrow he would wake in the city and would not see either Panna Marynia or little Anusia whom only, of all the inmates of that Jastrzeb mansion, he liked; and he felt a little sorrow. But as he understood that, after the arrival of his party associates at Rzeslewo and yesterday's visit of the steward Kapuscinski to Krzycki, it was unavoidable, he preferred to tender his resignation rather than suffer a dismissal. With this intention, he decided to write a letter to Ladislaus and inform him that he had enough of pedagogical work. He foresaw that eventually they would have to see each other, if only at the payment of the salary, and as a dispute about principles might arise which might go very far, he had a revolver ready for certain contingencies. He deemed that, before that happened, a dry, peremptory letter would be a step more consonant with his pride; therefore, when it was quite bright, he sat down immediately to write.