“Then why do you say I’ve been dreaming? Don’t you see that the Jew has come back? I saw him at the mill a moment ago, carrying that very same bundle.”
“And why shouldn’t he have come back?”
“Because the devil carried him off last year. Khapun, you know.”
Well, in a word, there was a great deal of amazement when the miller told of all that had happened to him. And in the meanwhile a crowd was beginning to collect in the road in front of the cottage; the people looked in at the window, and began making slanderous comments.
“Look at that!” they said. “There’s a nice state of affairs! The miller comes tearing across the fields without a hat, without boots, all ragged and torn, and runs straight into the widow’s cottage, and there he sits with them now!”
“Hey! Tell us, good man, whom have you come to see all dressed up like that? Is it Old Prisia, or young Galya?”
You will agree, I am sure, that no one can allow a poor girl to be gossiped about like that. The miller was simply obliged to marry her. But Philip has confessed to me many a time himself that he had always loved the widow’s Galya, and that after the night when she rescued him from the foul fiend’s clutches, she grew so dear to him that he wouldn’t have let himself be driven away from her with a stick.
They are living at the mill now, and already have several children. The miller has forgotten his inn and no longer lends money at interest. And whenever a voice in his heart whispers to him to wish Yankel the Jew out of the village to the devil, he only makes a contemptuous gesture.
“And the inn?” He used sometimes to ask people after his adventure. “Will it still remain?”
“Of course the inn will remain. What should become of it?”