, and his knee
rested on the roof. The sentry was approaching. Vassily lay motionless.
The sentry did not notice him, and passed on. Vassily leaped to his
feet; the iron roof cracked under him. Another step or two, and he would
reach the wall. He could touch it with his hand now. He leaned forward
with one hand, then with the other, stretched out his body as far as
he could, and found himself on the wall. Only, not to break his legs in
jumping down, Vassily turned round, remained hanging in the air by his
hands, stretched himself out, loosened the grip of one hand, then the
other. "Help, me, God!" He was on the ground. And the ground was soft.
His legs were not hurt, and he ran at the top of his speed. In a suburb,
Malania opened her door, and he crept under her warm coverlet, made of
small pieces of different colours stitched together.

X

THE wife of Peter Nikolaevich Sventizky, a tall and handsome woman, as
quiet and sleek as a well-fed heifer, had seen from her window how her
husband had been murdered and dragged away into the fields. The horror
of such a sight to Natalia Ivanovna was so intense--how could it be
otherwise?--that all her other feelings vanished. No sooner had the
crowd disappeared from view behind the garden fence, and the voices had
become still; no sooner had the barefooted Malania, their servant, run
in with her eyes starting out of her head, calling out in a voice
more suited to the proclamation of glad tidings the news that Peter
Nikolaevich had been murdered and thrown into the ravine, than Natalia
Ivanovna felt that behind her first sensation of horror, there was
another sensation; a feeling of joy at her deliverance from the tyrant,
who through all the nineteen years of their married life had made her
work without a moment's rest. Her joy made her aghast; she did not
confess it to herself, but hid it the more from those around. When
his mutilated, yellow and hairy body was being washed and put into the
coffin, she cried with horror, and wept and sobbed. When the coroner--a
special coroner for serious cases--came and was taking her evidence, she
noticed in the room, where the inquest was taking place, two peasants in
irons, who had been charged as the principal culprits. One of them was
an old man with a curly white beard, and a calm and severe countenance.
The other was rather young, of a gipsy type, with bright eyes and curly
dishevelled hair. She declared that they were the two men who h