Read "Polikoúshka" by Leo Tolstoy online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
All that day no one in Pokróvsk saw Polikéy. The mistress asked for him several times after dinner, and Aksyúta came flying to Akoulína; but Akoulína said he had not yet returned, and that evidently the customer had detained him, or something had happened to the horse. "If only it has not gone lame! " she said. "Last time, when Maxím went, he was on the road a whole day -- had to walk back all the way."
And Aksyúta turned her pendulums in the opposite direction, while Akoulína, trying to calm her own fears, invented reasons to account for her husband's absence; but in vain. Her heart was heavy, and she could not work with a will at any of the preparations for the morrow's holiday. She was suffering all the more because the joiner's wife assured her that she herself had seen "a man just like Polikoúshka drive up to the avenue, and then turn back again."