If she saw me in
it in Gradewitz, or if your acquaintances in the town saw me, wouldn't
they say, 'How well red suits Mrs. Tiralla. What a pretty wife Anton
Tiralla has'!"

He smirked.

"But what good would it be to me?" she continued, and her voice sank
and became quite feeble. "The rats would devour it."

"Drat the rats! Leave them alone!" He jumped up angrily, in spite of
his great love for her; she had bothered him too often and too much
with her rats. "To the devil with you and your everlasting rats!" Once
for all poison should never come into his house; rather a thousand rats
than one grain of poison. [Pg 17] Where there's poison the Evil One has
a hand in the game.

But she again forced his head down on her bosom. He _must_ remain
there. It was as if he were being bewitched by her hands as they played
about on his head.

He stammered like a child. "Leave the rats alone. Give me a
kiss--there, there." He pointed to the back of his ears, to this place,
that place, and she pinched her eyes together and pressed her mouth to
his hair.

She drew a deep and trembling breath, as if she were struggling for
air. She opened wide her firmly closed eyes and stared at one
particular point--always at one point. It must be! Then she said with a
voice that sounded like a caress, while her face, which he could not
see, was distorted with aversion:

"Would you like to sleep, darling? There, lean on my arm. Let Marianna
do the work alone, I'll stop with you. Oh, my darling, I'm so
frightened."

She clung to him more closely, so closely that her warm body seemed to
wind itself round him. "The rats, ugh!" She gave a trembling sigh.
"Those horrid rats! We'll put poison, won't we, darling? Poison for
rats; but soon, or I shall die of fright."

[Pg 18]

CHAPTER II

Mr. Trialla's farm lay some distance from the village, near the big
pines and deep morass of Przykop. Starydwor was a large farm, and there
were many in Starawie['s] who envied Mrs. Tiralla. She had been as
poor as a church mouse before her marriage--her mother was the widow
of a village schoolmaster--and had not even possessed six sets of
under-linen and a cart full of kitchen utensils, and now she had so
much money! But however much her enemies might wish her ill, nobody had
ever been able to say of her that she had been unfaithful to her old
husband.

The farmer was already getting on in years when he married her, and