"Steinmetz. Oh! why
won't he write to me?"
She tore open the letter, read it, and stood holding it in her hand,
looking out over the trackless pine-woods with absorbed, speculative
eyes. The sun had just set. The farthest ridge of pine-trees stood out
like the teeth of a saw in black relief on the rosy sky. Catrina
Lanovitch watched the rosiness fade into pearly gray.
"Madame the Countess awaits mademoiselle for tea," said the maid's voice
suddenly, in the gloom of the door-way.
"I will come."
The village of Thors--twenty miles farther down the river Oster, twenty
miles nearer to the junction of that river with the Volga--was little
more than a hamlet in the days of which we write. Some day, perhaps, the
three hundred souls of Thors may increase and multiply--some day when
Russia is attacked by the railway fever. For Thors is on the
Chorno-Ziom--the belt of black and fertile soil that runs right across
the vast empire.
Karl Steinmetz, a dogged watcher of the Wandering Jew--the deathless
scoffer at our Lord's agony, who shall never die, who shall leave
cholera in his track wherever he may wander--Karl Steinmetz knew that
the Oster was in itself a Wandering Jew. This river meandered through
the lonesome country, bearing cholera germs within its waters. Whenever
Osterno had cholera it sent it down the river to Thors, and so on to the
Volga.
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