some comforting cordial.
And now go and look after our confidants."

Ivan was still a little pale, and it seemed to him as if the master's
face also was of an odd yellow colour.

"How yellow the sky is!" said he, looking up, "not a speck of blue
anywhere. And what a long black cloud is rising up from the
horizon--just like a large black bird."

"Gape not at the sky, Ivan, but make haste and have everything ready
against the night."

"You can look right into the sun, there's not a bit of light in it when
it goes down," murmured he--and his head felt strangely dizzy.

"What have you got to do with the sky, or the sun, or the clouds?"
inquired the master sarcastically.

"Nothing, I suppose, nor with what is beyond them either. Good night, my
master," he cried after a pause, and turned truculently away.

"A happy and peaceful good night!" said the other with an ironical
smile.

"Pleasant dreams."

"And a joyful awakening."

And with that they parted. The master returned towards the village,
reading the immortal verses of Horace all the way along. But Ivan
hastened towards the lonely forest hut, looking up from time to time at
the yellow sky, the faded sun, and the long black cloud, and then
glancing around him horror-stricken, to perceive that he cast no shadow
either before or behind.

That sombre yellow light, how odd it was!--and then, too, that brown,
copper-coloured cloud, which was gradually covering the whole earth, and
enveloping the whole horizon with its broad sluggish wings like some
huge bat-like monster of the Nether World! And the little black letters
in the master's open book seemed to be dancing together in long dizzying
rows, and this is what he read:

"... Pallida Mors
Aequo pede pulsat
Pauperum tabernas
Regumnque turres..."

CHAPTER XI.

THE FIRST SPARK.

Maria Kamienszka talked for the whole of a long hour with the General's
wife.

She told her all she knew of that unhappy family, whose fate was bound
up with the General's by such tragic memories.

She had learnt to know the disowned and rejected son as a gallant young
officer in Galicia, and the relations which had sprung up between them
were the tenderest imaginable.

The calamity which compelled the youth to fly had profoundly affected
but not overwhelmed her, for Maria, with that virile determination which
has so frequently distinguished the Polish women, had followed up the
track of the vanished yo