They were both hungry, and presently they began to feel tired as well. Yet neither of them was disposed to halt or to break silence except by an occasional word or two that meant nothing.
At last he said:
“You must be quite fatigued. It’s cruel of me.”
“I am, but it isn’t cruel of you,” she answered, stopping short, and drawing a deep, smiling breath.
He ran into a washerwoman’s hovel, startling a brood of ducklings on his way, and soon came back with the information that milk was to be had in a trackman’s hut beyond a sparse grove to the right.
A few minutes later they sat at a rude table in a miniature garden between the shining steel rails of the track and a red-painted cabin. It was the fourth track-house from the Miroslav railroad station and was generally known as the Fourth Hut. Besides milk and eggs and coarse rye bread they found sour soup. They ate heartily, but an echo of their exalted dream was still on them. To Pavel this feeling was embodied in an atmosphere of femininity that pervaded his consciousness at this moment. He was sensible of sitting in front of a pretty, healthy girl full of modest courage and undemonstrative inspiration. The lingering solemnity of his mood seemed to have something to do with the shimmering little hairs which the breeze was stirring on Clara’s neck, as she bent over her earthen bowl, with the warm colouring of her ear, with the elastic firmness of her cheek, with the airiness of her blouse.
A desire stirred in him to speak once more of the part she had unconsciously played in his conversion, and at this he felt that if he told her the story he would find a peculiar pleasure in exaggerating the importance of the effect which her “speech” had produced on his mind. But it came over him that Makar was still behind the prison gate and that this was not the time to enjoy oneself.