en; and the snow will fall when
you are gone."

He sat on the bench of the piazza, and said nothing. But in the
distant fields, in the growing darkness, a shepherd's whistle
gave out clear tones, simple, monotonous, they flew along the
field like the weeping of space.

"Why go; do you know why--God alone knows. What are you throwing
away? The beauties of God. What will you bring back? Perhaps the
mud people cast at you."

A cow bellowed in the stable; a belated working-woman muttered a
song somewhere behind in the garden. The evening red was
quenched; and above the roof the crescent of the moon came out,
thin and like silver.

Widow Clemens whispered:

"Ill-fated! ill-fated boy!"

He was immensely far from considering himself ill fated, but
something in his heart felt pain at leaving that village where he
was born, at leaving Malvina, and it seemed to him that he ought
to stay.

But he went. The Argonaut, of twenty and some years of age, went
out into the world, slender, adroit, with eyes dark and fiery as
youth, with cheeks shapely and fresh as peaches, with a forehead
as white and pure as the petal of a lily; he went for a wife with
a fortune, for the pleasures of the world--for the golden fleece.

Now he wrapped himself closely in the skirt of his faded
dressing-gown, and let his head droop so low that the bald spot
seemed white on the top of it; his lower lip dropped; the red
spots came out over his dark brows on his wrinkled forehead. In
his hand he held the cigarette-case presented by Countess
Eugenia, now living in Paris, and at times he turned it in his
fingers, with an unconscious movement, and that glittering object
cast on the tattered sleeve of his dressing-gown, on his
suffering face, on his long, thin fingers, its bright, golden
reflection.

Meanwhile widow Clemens had returned to the kitchen, and there,
not without a loud clattering of overshoes, had begun to cook the
dinner. But Kranitski neither heard nor saw anything. From time
to time the head, with its great cap, looked in through the
kitchen door, gazed on him unquietly and pushed back to look in
again soon.

"Will you have dinner now?" inquired she at last. "It is ready."

In a low voice he asked for dinner, but he ate almost nothing;
the woman had never yet seen him so broken, still she made no
inquiry. When the moment came he would tell all himself. He was
not of those who bear secrets to the grave with them. She waited
on the