Page:Balkan Short Stories.djvu/195

Rh

Out of the valley the echo came back, and in the echo there was something defiant, fawn-like.

Now the peasant boy left the highway and turned toward the hills. Above, between the fruit trees—one half of it pallid-white from the moonlight,—the other half black with shadows, peeped out a peasant’s home. On the shadowed side, one tiny window shone fiery red from a lamp.

When the peasant reached the foot of the hill, the light was extinguished. A door within the house was heard to open, and a figure slipped across the moonlighted courtyard.

“Ah, ha!” I said to myself, not without envy. “I thought it must be a lover’s rendezvous.” In the meantime he had slowly climbed the hill. A woman’s form came toward him a hundred steps away. From my place of concealment, behind the thick trunk of an old apple tree, I recognized in the girl—Jagica, the prettiest peasant girl in the country. A shiver touched me. “She!—And how prim she always appears,” I added between my teeth.