He shook his head.
"I had been so anxious about you. I thought perhaps you weren't coming back, and then when you did----" She turned and fled through the door. Her footsteps died away in the night....
The following morning Boleslav was awakened by a great rushing and roaring that had for some time mingled with his dreams. A terrific storm was raging. The topmost branches of the poplars lashed each other in fury. Huge white clouds were swept along the ground, but the air was clear. Another fall of snow seemed improbable. To-day he could not rest in the desolate, cold little house, and went out to wrestle with the elements.
"She will have a bad time of it," he thought, as the north wind hurled in his face a shower of fine icicles that pricked like needles and almost took his breath away. In the wood it was more sheltered. There the tempest crashed and crunched in the tops of the trees, seeming to vent all its fury on them. He walked on, not knowing where he was going, and then found himself on the road to Bockeldorf.
"It looks as if I were running after her," he murmured, chiding himself; and he struck into the pathless thicket.
He thought how remarkable it was that this degraded being should creep so much into his thoughts. Of course it was because he had been thrown with her day after day, and depended upon her entirely for human society. Yet he was alarmed, for he realised now, perhaps more than he had ever done before, how he felt himself every day more drawn towards her, and how much there was in her that began to appear comprehensible, excusable, and even noble, that once had only seemed to testify to her innate coarseness, and repelled him from her in disgust.
But without a doubt contact with her was doing him no good. She was drawing him down into the slough of her own worthless existence.
Something must be done. Above all, it was necessary to stand in less familiar relations with her, to repress her, and lower her again to her old position of humble and despised servant-girl. The festival of Christmas was a good opportunity of paying her off with a loan, the handsomeness of which would discharge his obligations to her for all time. With a stroke of the pen he would provide for her future, and thereby purchase the right to regard her as what she actually was--his humble dependant and menial. She should give him her company to-day for the last time. She had not yet finished her evidence, and as he had once broken the ice he might as well know everything. Of those two awful nights of guilt and shame, in which she had been a witness of bloodshed and arson, he would hear the worst.
"And then when she has confessed all," he said to himself, "she shall keep to her green-house, which is her proper place, even if she has to burn all the timber in the park to prevent herself from freezing."
It was not seemly that in this solitude he should associate so much with her, and he made up his mind to put an end to the intimacy once for all.