It is about time that you took the ladies away from here and left me to manage it alone." "That time will never come again," answered Paul.

"I am not going to leave you alone again." He was pushing his arms into the sleeves of the old brown coat reaching to his heels, a garment which commanded as much love and respect in Osterno as ever would an angel's wing.
Steinmetz opened the drawer of his bureau and laid a revolver on the table.
"At all events," he said, "you may as well have the wherewithal to make a fight of it, if the worst comes to the worst." "As you like," answered Paul, slipping the fire-arm into his pocket.
The starosta moved away a pace or two.

He was essentially a man of peace.
Half an hour later it became known in the village that the Moscow doctor was in the house of one Ivan Krass, where he was prepared to see all patients who were now suffering from infectious complaints.

The door of this cottage was soon besieged by the sick and the idle, while the starosta stood in the door-way and kept order.
Within, in the one dwelling-room of the cottage, were assembled as picturesque and as unsavory a group as the most enthusiastic modern "slummer" could desire to see.
Paul, standing by the table with two paraffin lamps placed behind him, saw each suppliant in turn, and all the while he kept up a running conversation with the more intelligent, some of whom lingered on to talk and watch.
"Ah, John the son of John," he would say, "what is the matter with you?
It is not often I see you.

I thought you were clean and thrifty." To which John the son of John replied that the winter had been hard and fuel scarce, that his wife was dead and his children stricken with influenza.
"But you have had relief; our good friend the starosta--" "Does what he can," grumbled John, "but he dare not do much.