All that day no one in Pokróvsk saw Polikéy. The mistress asked for him several times after dinner, and Aksyúta came flying to Akoulína; but Akoulína said he had not yet returned, and that evidently the customer had detained him, or something had happened to the horse. “If only it has not gone lame!” she said. “Last time, when Maxím went, he was on the road a whole day—had to walk back all the way.”
And Aksyúta turned her pendulums in the opposite direction, while Akoulína, trying to calm her own fears, invented reasons to account for her husband’s absence; but in vain. Her heart was heavy, and she could not work with a will at any of the preparations for the morrow’s holiday. She was suffering all the more because the joiner’s wife assured her that she herself had seen “a man just like Polikoúshka drive up to the avenue, and then turn back again.”
The children were also anxiously expecting “Daddy,” but for another reason. Annie and Mary, being left without the sheepskin and the coat which made it possible to take turns out of doors, could only run out in their indoor dresses, quickly and in a small circle round the house. This was not a little inconvenient for all the dwellers in the serfs’ quarters who wanted to go in or out. Once Mary ran against the legs of the joiner’s wife, who was carrying water, and though she began to howl in anticipation as soon as she knocked against the woman’s knees, she got her hair pulled all the same, and cried still louder. When she did not knock against anyone, she flew in at the door, and, straightway climbing on a tub, got on to the top of the oven. Only the mistress and Akoulína were really anxious about Polikéy; the children were concerned only about what he had on.