All that day no one heard anything of Polikéy; only later on it was known that some neighbouring peasants had seen him running about on the road, bareheaded, and asking everybody whether they had seen a letter. Another man had seen him asleep by the roadside, beside a horse and cart tied up. “I thought he was tipsy,” the man said; “and the horse looked as if it had not been fed for two days, its sides were so fallen in.”

Akoulína did not sleep all night, and kept listening; but Polikéy did not return that night. Had she been alone, and had she kept a cook and a maid, she would have felt still more unhappy; but as soon as the cocks crowed and the joiner’s wife got up, Akoulína was obliged to rise and light the fire. It was a holiday. The bread had to come out of the oven before daybreak, kvass had to be made, cakes baked, the cow milked, dresses and shirts ironed, the children washed, and the neighbour not allowed to take up the whole of the oven. So Akoulína, still listening, set to work.