That evening they said nothing more to each other. At night Vaska was delirious; a rattling, a howling, came from his broad chest. He gritted his teeth and waved his right arm in the air, sometimes striking his chest with it.

Aksinya woke up, stood beside the bed and looked into his face fearfully for a long time. Then she waked him.

“What’s the matter with you? Was the house-sprite choking you, or what?”

“Nothing, I was dreaming…” Vaska said weakly. “Give me some water.”

When he had had a drink he wagged his head and declared:

“No, I’m not going to open a house. I’d rather have a shop.…That’s better. I won’t want a house.”

“A shop…” said Aksinya pensively. “Yes, a shop…that’s a good thing.”

“Will you come with me? Will you?” Vaska asked with quiet urgency.

“Do you really mean it?” Aksinya exclaimed, moving away from the bed.

“Aksinya Semyonovna,” said Vaska respectfully, in a ringing voice, lifting his head from the pillow, “I swear by…”

He waved his hand in the air and fell silent.

“I’ll go nowhere with you,” said Aksinya with a resolute shake of the head, after waiting a moment for him to finish, “nowhere!”

“If I want you to, you will,” said Vaska quietly.

“I won’t go anywhere!”

“But that’s not what I mean.…But if I wanted you to, you’d go.”

“Oh, no…”

“What the devil!” Vaska cried in irritation. “Here you’re fussing over me, doing things for me, so why won’t you…”

“That’s different,” Aksinya explained. “But as for living with you, no! I’m afraid of you. You’re an evil man.”

“Oh, you…What do you know about it?” Vaska exclaimed venomously. “ ‘Evil man!’ You’re a fool. ‘Evil man,’ you think, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe you think it’s easy to do evil.”

He broke off, and was silent for a while, rubbing his chest with his sound hand. Then, quietly, with anguish in his voice and fear in his eyes, he spoke again.

“You’re laying it on thick. ‘Evil,’ well, is that the whole story? A-agh! What did they ask of me? Won’t you come with me, Aksinya Semyonovna?”

“Don’t say another word about it! I won’t,” Aksinya asserted stubbornly, and moved away from him with a look of suspicion.