this very distinctly) motioned Aglaia towards the iron with his
finger; and only when the blood began trickling through his hands
and he heard Dashutka's loud wail, and when the ironing-board fell
with a crash, and Matvey rolled heavily on it, Yakov left off feeling
anger and understood what had happened.

"Let him rot, the factory buck!" Aglaia brought out with repulsion,
still keeping the iron in her hand. The white bloodstained kerchief
slipped on to her shoulders and her grey hair fell in disorder.
"He's got what he deserved!"

Everything was terrible. Dashutka sat on the floor near the stove
with the yarn in her hands, sobbing, and continually bowing down,
uttering at each bow a gasping sound. But nothing was so terrible
to Yakov as the potato in the blood, on which he was afraid of
stepping, and there was something else terrible which weighed upon
him like a bad dream and seemed the worst danger, though he could
not take it in for the first minute. This was the waiter, Sergey
Nikanoritch, who was standing in the doorway with the reckoning
beads in his hands, very pale, looking with horror at what was
happening in the kitchen. Only when he turned and went quickly into
the passage and from there outside, Yakov grasped who it was and
followed him.

Wiping his hands on the snow as he went, he reflected. The idea
flashed through his mind that their labourer had gone away long
before and had asked leave to stay the night at home in the village;
the day before they had killed a pig, and there were huge bloodstains
in the snow and on the sledge, and even one side of the top of the
well was splattered with blood, so that it could not have seemed