e
that has been blessed too! You would have cut it on the road, and
shouldn't I have looked a fool when I got home?"

Without saying anything to his wife, Maxim went into the kitchen,
wrapped a piece of cake up in a napkin, together with half a dozen
eggs, and went to the labourers in the barn.

"Kuzma, put down your concertina," he said to one of them. "Saddle
the bay, or Ivantchik, and ride briskly to the Crooked Ravine. There
you will see a sick Cossack with a horse, so give him this. Maybe
he hasn't ridden away yet."

Maxim felt cheerful again, but after waiting for Kuzma for some
hours, he could bear it no longer, so he saddled a horse and went
off to meet him. He met him just at the Ravine.

"Well, have you seen the Cossack?"

"I can't find him anywhere, he must have ridden on."

"H'm . . . a queer business."

Tortchakov took the bundle from Kuzma, and galloped on farther.
When he reached Shustrovo he asked the peasants:

"Friends, have you seen a sick Cossack with a horse? Didn't he ride
by here? A red-headed fellow on a bay horse."

The peasants looked at one another, and said they had not seen the
Cossack.

"The returning postman drove by, it's true, but as for a Cossack
or anyone else, there has been no such."

Maxim got home at dinner time.

"I can't get that Cossack out of my head, do what you will!" he
said to his wife. "He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if
God meant to try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a
Cossack? It does happen, you know. It's bad, Lizaveta; we were
unkind to the man!"

"What do you keep pestering me with that Cossack for?" cried Lizaveta,
losing patience at last. "You stick to it like tar!"

"You are not kind, you know . . ." said Maxim, looking into his
wife's face.

And for the first time since his marriage he perceived that he wife
was not kind.

"I may be unkind," cried Lizaveta, tapping angrily with her spoon,
"but I am not going to give away the holy Easter cake to every
drunken man in the road."

"The Cossack wasn't drunk!"

"He was drunk!"

"Well, you are a fool then!"

Maxim got up from the table and began reproaching his young wife
for hard-heartedness and stupidity. She, getting angry too, answered
his reproaches with reproaches, burst into tears, and went away
into their bedroom, declaring she would go home to her father's.
This was the first matrimonial squabble that had happened in the
Tortchakov's married life. He wa