f at her mother's side a short time ago, is almost nicer-looking
now. She's really not at all bad."

"You had better keep your fingers off her," said some one. "She's going
into a convent."

[Pg 277]

"Tut, tut, don't talk nonsense. She--with _those_ eyes?"

But the gendarme knew it for a fact, for the priest had mentioned quite
a short time ago that the Ladies of the Sacred Heart at the Wallischei
had been told of Rosa Tiralla's coming.

"Very well then, I shan't," said Schmielke. He made no more of his
frivolous remarks, but grew silent as the others had gradually done.
They all felt out of tune, thoroughly depressed. Starydwor seemed to be
running behind them, now that they had left the place. In their mind's
eye they continued to see the black birds on the gloomy-looking roofs,
and the man who had hanged himself and was still alive, and the woman
who had cut him down and who still smiled.

All at once they hastened their steps, and not another word was spoken
until they reached the first house in Starawie['s].

Then they began to speak of the schoolmaster. That was another of them,
he and Tiralla were a couple. Both of them were being ruined by drink.
But it was a great shame of Boehnke, for he ought to be a pattern to the
children, as the priest very rightly had said. How could such a fellow
teach children, a man who drank so much that he had been found in the
ditch like a tramp, his clothes torn, and bleeding and dirty? It was a
great disgrace.

The gendarme could tell a tale about that. He had many a time seen the
schoolmaster coming home at dawn, and had watched him trying to poke
his key into the lock; he had many a time had to help him to open the
door. But when he had picked him out of the ditch on his way home from
a round in the Przykop, looking no better than a drunken vagabond whom
you [Pg 278] look up, he had felt obliged to speak about it. Father
Szypulski would perhaps have preferred him to have hushed it up, but it
surely would not do for the village schoolmaster to be found lying
drunk and bruised in a ditch. It would have been found out sooner or
later, and then nobody would have any respect for him. Of course, the
man could not stop at Starawie['s], and who knows, perhaps he would
have to give up being a schoolmaster altogether. The priest, who as a
rule was so loquacious, had never said a word about it.

As they came past the house where Boehnke lived, they looked at it
askance. What di