The Faraway Bride by Stella Benson — Read

Seryozha's dog, all netted with spiders' webs and glazed with dew, stood in the doorway, collecting with a high nose the too faint traces of Seryozha's vicinity. The smell of putrefying fish clinging to Seryozha's pack in the passageway cheered the dog a good deal; it knew that smell by now as part of the family. The house seemed to be empty of everything but air, and this happy patch of smelly air was a sort of ghost of Seryozha -- the next best thing to the presence of that solid and glorious being. The dog stood for a long time with its nose pressed very hard to a spot on the floor on which Seryozha had dropped, hours before, a small shred of fish liver. For quite a minute, the bereaved dog licked this spot slowly, romantically, like a melancholy epicure.

Slanting from the windows were shallow barred slides of sunlight, down and across which raced and blew and eddied the little light glittering typhoons of dust stirred up by Katya's recent sweeping. The pale floor mats were a rectangular maze of sunlight and shadow; and flies seemed to browse in these square fields of sunlight like cattle seen from an airplane. Now and then this restful illusion was broken by one fly rising and flying petulantly away as another one alighted. A sequin-blue butterfly with a long tail flew uncertainly in from the garden, its shadow dodging across the fields of sun and dikes of shade, and settled on Tanya's blue cloak which hung on a peg. It opened and closed its wings slowly before its shadow, like a queen trying on a new dress before the glass. Summer morning danced in the house, but, to the dog, human bustle alone spelled morning -- and human bustle was disturbingly lacking here. There were so many strangers in the house -- the blue butterfly, a couple of thistledowns riding high across the ceiling, a muddy spade with a rather dead section of worm on it, leaning against the wall, a riding-whip smelling of horse, a noisy bee that hovered about the dog's shrinking ear, an insolent brown hen on the threshold -- all strangers -- no friends -- and the dog loathed strangers. Strangers so often have stings, like bees, or sticks, like beggars, or kicks, like horses; they never smell right.