89
wore off, like the shadow of a cloud running swiftly over green meadows. A couple now passed by them, a man wearing a hat and coat, but barefooted, and an ill-clad woman with him. Without accounting for it Tenaida looked back after the receding woman, and was a little astonished why she wore such a thin wet dress, for the lower part of it was covered with mud. There seemed to be something frightful, morbid, and terribly hopeless in the waving of the scant and dirty lower part of the dress of this lost woman.
They went on, speaking loudly, and after them a black cloud moved unwillingly, throwing behind it a transparent shadow. By the side of a widely spread cloud, richly illuminated with copper coloured spots, and in which some glaring, winding stripes were hiding behind its dark mass, twilight fell imper-
