"If you want to, I'll run over to Daryina, and I'll tell the women to bring their lace here. That'll save your going there. It's about eight miles."
"That's not necessary, my dear."
The cold air refreshed the mother as she stepped along beside the girl. A resolution slowly formulated itself in her mind—confused, but fraught with a promise. She wished to hasten its growth, and asked herself persistently: "How shall I behave? Suppose I come straight out with the truth?"
It was dark, damp, and cold. The windows of the peasants' huts shone dimly with a motionless reddish light; the cattle lowed drowsily in the stillness, and short halloos reverberated through the fields. The village was clothed in darkness and an oppressive melancholy.
"Here!" said the girl, "you've chosen a poor lodging for yourself. This peasant is very poor." She opened the door and shouted briskly into the hut: "Aunt Tatyana, a lodger has come!" She ran away, her "Good-by!" flying back from the darkness.
The mother stopped at the threshold and peered about with her palm above her eyes. The hut was very small, but its cleanness and neatness caught the eye at once. From behind the stove a young woman bowed silently and disappeared. On a table in a corner toward the front of the room burned a lamp. The master of the hut sat at the table, tapping his fingers on its edge. He fixed his glance on the mother's eyes.
"Come in!" he said, after a deliberate pause.
"Tatyana, go call Pyotr. Quick!"
The woman hastened away without looking at her guest. The mother seated herself on the bench opposite the peasant and looked around—her valise was not in sight. An oppressive stillness filled the hut, broken only by the scarcely audible sputtering of the lamplight. The face of the peasant, preoccupied and gloomy, wavered in vague outline before the eyes of the mother, and for some reason caused her dismal annoyance.
"Well, why doesn't he say something? Quick!"