“Come, come, never mind!” said the miller, stepping back. “One would think you were doing something important! You’re a bad lad, you are, to smack a girl like that; you make a man envious. Oh, what are people coming to!”
He stood still for a moment, thought a bit, scratched his head, and finally turned aside, threw his leg over the hedge, and crossed a field to a widow’s cottage that stood a little way back from the road in the shade of a tall poplar tree.
The khata was a tiny, lop-sided affair, crumbling and falling to pieces. Its one little window was so minute that it would have been almost invisible had the night been at all dark. But now the whole cottage was glowing in the moonlight; its straw roof was shining like gold, its walls seemed to be made of silver, and the little window was blinking like a dark eye.
No light shone behind it. Probably the old woman and her daughter had no fuel and nothing to cook for supper.
The miller paused a moment, then knocked twice at the window and went a few steps aside.
He had not long to wait before two plump girlish arms were wound tightly around his neck, and something glowed among his whiskers that felt very much like two lips pressed to his mouth. Hey ho, what more is there to tell! If you have ever been kissed like that you know yourself how it feels. If you haven’t, it’s no use trying to tell you.
“Oh, Philipko, my darling for whom I have longed!” crooned the girl. “You have come, you have come! And I have been waiting so wearily for you. I thought I should parch up with longing, like grass without water.”
“Eh hey, she hasn’t parched up, though, thank God!” thought the miller, as he pressed the girl’s not emaciated form to his breast. “Thank God, she is all right yet!”
“And when shall we have the wedding, Philip?” asked the girl with her hands still lying on Philip’s shoulders, while she devoured him with burning eyes as dark as an autumn night. “Saint Philip’s day will soon be here.”
This speech was less to the miller’s liking than the girl’s kisses.