“Step up on my stirrup and I’ll carry you away to the mountains. Mammy!” he suddenly exclaimed, and as if to disperse his dark thoughts he caracoled among the girls. Stooping down towards Maryánka, he said, “I’ll kiss, oh, how I’ll kiss you! ...”
Maryánka’s eyes met his and she suddenly blushed and stepped back.
“Oh, bother you! you’ll crush my feet,” she said, and bending her head looked at her well-shaped feet in their tightly fitting light blue stockings with clocks and her new red slippers trimmed with narrow silver braid.
Lukáshka turned towards Ústenka, and Maryánka sat down next to a woman with a baby in her arms. The baby stretched his plump little hands towards the girl and seized a necklace string that hung down onto her blue beshmet. Maryánka bent towards the child and glanced at Lukáshka from the corner of her eyes. Lukáshka just then was getting out from under his coat, from the pocket of his black beshmet, a bundle of sweetmeats and seeds.
“There, I give them to all of you,” he said, handing the bundle to Ústenka and smiling at Maryánka.
A confused expression again appeared on the girl’s face. It was as though a mist gathered over her beautiful eyes. She drew her kerchief down below her lips, and leaning her head over the fair-skinned face of the baby that still held her by her coin necklace she suddenly began to kiss it greedily. The baby pressed his little hands against the girl’s high breasts, and opening his toothless mouth screamed loudly.
“You’re smothering the boy!” said the little one’s mother, taking him away; and she unfastened her beshmet to give him the breast. “You’d better have a chat with the young fellow.”
“I’ll only go and put up my horse and then Nazárka and I will come back; we’ll make merry all night,” said Lukáshka, touching his horse with his whip and riding away from the girls.
Turning into a side street, he and Nazárka rode up to two huts that stood side by side.
“Here we are all right, old fellow! Be quick and come soon!” called Lukáshka to his comrade, dismounting in front of one of the huts; then he carefully led his horse in at the gate of the wattle fence of his own home.