Besides Doútlof’s family, there were four others in which there were three young men, but one was the village elder’s family, and the proprietress had exempted him. From the second, a recruit had been taken the year before, and from the remaining families two recruits were now being taken. One of them had not even come to this Meeting, only his wife stood sorrowfully behind all the others, vaguely expecting that the wheel of fortune might somehow turn her way. The red-haired Román, the father of the other recruit, in a tattered coat⁠—though he was not poor⁠—hung his head and silently leant against the porch railing, only now and then attentively looking up at anybody who raised his voice, and then hanging his head again. Misery seemed to breathe from his whole figure. Old Simeon Doútlof was a man to whose keeping anyone who knew him would have trusted hundreds and thousands of roubles. He was a steady, God-fearing, well-to-do man, and was churchwarden. Therefore the predicament in which he found himself was all the more startling.