Tortchakov drank half a glass of tea, and neither ate nor drank anything more. He had no appetite, the tea seemed to choke him, and he felt depressed again. After breaking their fast, his wife and he lay down to sleep. When Lizaveta woke two hours later, he was standing by the window, looking into the yard.

“Are you up already?” asked his wife.

“I somehow can’t sleep.…Ah, Lizaveta,” he sighed. “We were unkind, you and I, to that Cossack!”

“Talking about that Cossack again!” yawned his wife. “You have got him on the brain.”

“He has served his Tsar, shed his blood maybe, and we treated him as though he were a pig. We ought to have brought the sick man home and fed him, and we did not even give him a morsel of bread.”

“Catch me letting you spoil the Easter cake for nothing! And one 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.