s starving dogs.

"I looked round, with the sweat on my face, vaguely, for some human being
to share the horror of the moment, and I saw, gliding away, far away in
the white distance, the black silhouette of the sledge."

"Well?" said we, in divers tones of impatience, curiosity, or horror,
according to our divers temperaments, as the speaker uncrossed his legs
and gazed at us in mild triumph, with all the air of having said his say,
and satisfactorily proved his point.

"Well," repeated he, "what more do you want to know? It will interest you
but slightly, I am sure, to hear how I found my way back to the Hof; or
how I told as much as I deemed prudent of the evening's grewsome work to
the baron's servants, who, by the way, to my amazement, displayed the
profoundest and most unmistakable sorrow at the tidings, and sallied forth
(at their head the Cossack who had seen us depart) to seek for his
remains. Excuse the unpleasantness of the remark: I fear the dogs must
have left very little of him, he had dieted them so carefully. However,
since it was to have been a case of 'chop, crunch, and gobble,' as the
baron had it, I preferred that that particular fate should have overtaken
him rather than me--or, for that matter, either of those two country
people of ours in the sledge.

"Nor am I going to inflict upon you," continued Marshfield, after draining
his glass, "a full account of my impressions when I found myself once more
in that immense, deserted, and stricken house, so luxuriously prepared for
the mistress who had fled from it; how I philosophized over all this,
according to my wont; the conjectures I made as to the first acts of the
drama; the untold sufferings my countrywoman must have endured from the
moment her husband first grew jealous till she determined on this
desperate step; as to how and when she had met her lover, how they
communicated, and how the baron had discovered the intended flitting in
time to concoct his characteristic revenge.

"One thing you may be sure of, I had no mind to remain at Yany an hour
longer than necessary. I even contrived to get well clear of the
neighborhood before the lady's absence was discovered. Luckily for me--or
I might have been taxed with connivance, though indeed the simple
household did not seem to know what suspicion was, and accepted my account
with childlike credence--very typical, and very convenient to me at the
same time."

"But how do you know," said one of u