_for ten years_. More miserable than he was as
a soldier, and... I'll give him my purse. H'm! _J'ai en tout quarante
roubles; il prendra les roubles et il me tuera tout de meme._"

In his panic he for some reason shut up the umbrella and laid it down
beside him. A cart came into sight on the high road in the distance
coming from the town.

"_Grace a Dieu_, that's a cart and it's coming at a walking pace; that
can't be dangerous. The wretched little horses here... I always said
that breed... It was Pyotr Ilyitch though, he talked at the club
about horse-breeding and I trumped him, _et puis_... but what's that
behind?... I believe there's a woman in the cart. A peasant and a woman,
_cela commence a etre rassurant._ The woman behind and the man in front--
_c'est tres rassurant._ There's a cow behind the cart tied by the horns,
_c'est rassurant au plus haut degre._"

The cart reached him; it was a fairly solid peasant cart. The woman was
sitting on a tightly stuffed sack and the man on the front of the cart
with his legs hanging over towards Stepan Trofimovitch. A red cow was,
in fact, shambling behind, tied by the horns to the cart. The man
and the woman gazed open-eyed at Stepan Trofimovitch, and Stepan
Trofimovitch gazed back at them with equal wonder, but after he had let
them pass twenty paces, he got up hurriedly all of a sudden and walked
after them. In the proximity of the cart it was natural that he
should feel safer, but when he had overtaken it he became oblivious
of everything again and sank back into his disconnected thoughts and
fancies. He stepped along with no suspicion, of course, that for the
two peasants he was at that instant the most mysterious and interesting
object that one could meet on the high road.

"What sort may you be, pray, if it's not uncivil to ask?" the woman
could not resist asking at last when Stepan Trofimovitch glanced
absent-mindedly at her. She was a woman of about seven and twenty,
sturdily built, with black eyebrows, rosy cheeks, and a friendly smile
on her red lips, between which gleamed white even teeth.

"You... you are addressing me?" muttered Stepan Trofimovitch with
mournful wonder.

"A merchant, for sure," the peasant observed confidently. He was a
well-grown man of forty with a broad and intelligent face, framed in a
reddish beard.

"No, I am not exactly a merchant, I... I... _moi c'est autre chose._"
Stepan Trofimovitch parried the question somehow, and to be on the