I recognized the voice of Ieronim. There was no darkness now to
hinder me from seeing the monk. He was a tall narrow-shouldered man
of five-and-thirty, with large rounded features, with half-closed
listless-looking eyes and an unkempt wedge-shaped beard. He had an
extraordinarily sad and exhausted look.

"They have not relieved you yet?" I asked in surprise.

"Me?" he answered, turning to me his chilled and dewy face with a
smile. "There is no one to take my place now till morning. They'll
all be going to the Father Archimandrite's to break the fast
directly."

With the help of a little peasant in a hat of reddish fur that
looked like the little wooden tubs in which honey is sold, he threw
his weight on the rope; they gasped simultaneously, and the ferry
started.

We floated across, disturbing on the way the lazily rising mist.
Everyone was silent. Ieronim worked mechanically with one hand. He
slowly passed his mild lustreless eyes over us; then his glance
rested on the rosy face of a young merchant's wife with black
eyebrows, who was standing on the ferry beside me silently shrinking
from the mist that wrapped her about. He did not take his eyes off
her face all the way.

There was little that was masculine in that prolonged gaze. It
seemed to me that Ieronim was looking in the woman's face for the
soft and tender features of his dead friend.