his coat and tucking under his knee the right skirt, which the wind kept turning up.
But he longed so passionately to tell somebody of his joyful condition that he said: “Nikíta!”
“It’s comfortable, warm!” came a voice from beneath.
“There, you see, friend, I was going to perish. And you would have been frozen, and I should have …”
But again his jaws began to quiver and his eyes to fill with tears, and he could say no more.
“Well, never mind,” he thought. “I know about myself what I know.”
He remained silent and lay like that for a long time.
Nikíta kept him warm from below and his fur coats from above. Only his hands, with which he kept his coat-skirts down round Nikíta’s sides, and his legs which the wind kept uncovering, began to freeze, especially his right hand which had no glove. But he did not think of his legs or of his hands but only of how to warm the peasant who was lying under him. He looked out several times at Mukhórty and could see that his back was uncovered and the drugget and breeching lying on the snow, and that he ought to get up and cover him, but he could not bring himself to leave Nikíta and disturb even for a moment the joyous condition he was in. He no longer felt any kind of terror.
“No fear, we shan’t lose him this time!” he said to himself, referring to his getting the peasant warm with the same boastfulness with which he spoke of his buying and selling.
Vasíli Andréevich lay in that way for one hour, another, and a third, but he was unconscious of the passage of time. At first impressions of the