“Gracious!... Courage, my boy!”
“I want to send a letter home, that’s what it is,” she said; her voice was beseeching, soft, timid.
“Deuce take you!” I thought; but up I jumped, sat down at my table, took a sheet of paper, and said:
“Come here, sit down, and dictate!”
She came, sat down very gingerly on a chair, and looked at me with a guilty look.
“Well, to whom do you want to write?”
“To Boleslav Kashput, at the town of Svieptziana, on the Warsaw Road...”
“Well, fire away!”
“My dear Boles ... my darling ... my faithful lover. May the Mother of God protect thee! Thou heart of gold, why hast thou not written for such a long time to thy sorrowing little dove, Teresa?”
I very nearly burst out laughing. “A sorrowing little dove!” more than five feet high, with fists a stone and more in weight, and as black a face as if the little dove had lived all its life in a chimney, and had never once washed itself! Restraining myself somehow, I asked: