nging brows, that she
has recently been weeping in the terrified, hysterical fashion of a
person of weak intellect.

I have come here with that man and other strangers thus I heard her
narrate in low, querulous tones as with a stumpy finger she rearranged
the faded hair under her yellow and green scarf.

A fat-faced youth with high cheek-bones and the small eyes of a Mongol
here nudged her, and said carelessly:

"You mean, rather, that your own man has cast you off. Probably he was
the only man you ever saw."

"Aye," Konev drawled thoughtfully as he felt in his wallet. "Nowadays
folk need think little of deserting a woman, since in this year of
grace women are no good at all."

Upon this the woman frowned--then blinked her eyes timidly, and would
have opened her lips to reply, but that her companion interrupted her
by saying in a brisk, incisive tone:

"Do not listen to those rascals!"

* * * * *

The woman's companion, some five or six years her senior, has a face
exceptional in the constant change and movement of its great dark eyes
as at one moment they withdraw themselves from the street of the
Cossack hamlet, to gaze fixedly and gravely towards the steppe where it
lies scoured with the scudding breeze, and at another moment fall to
scanning the faces of the persons around her, and, at another, frown
anxiously, or send a smile flitting across her comely lips as she bends
her head, until her features are concealed. Next, the head is raised
again, for the eyes have taken on another phase, and become dilated
with interest, while a sharp furrow is forming between the slender
eyebrows, and the finely moulded lips and trim mouth have compressed
themselves together, and the thin nostrils of the straight nose are
snuffing the air like those of a horse.

In fact, in the woman there is something non-peasant in its origin. For
instance, let one but watch her sharply clicking feet as, in walking,
they peep from under her blue skirt, and one will perceive that they
are not the splayed feet of a villager, but, rather, feet arched of
instep, and at one time accustomed to the wearing of boots. Or, as the
woman sits engaged in embroidering a blue bodice with a pattern of
white peas, one will perceive that she has long been accustomed to
plying the needle so dexterously; swiftly do the small, sunburnt hands
fly in and out under the tumbled material, eagerly though the wind may
strive to wrest it