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 have known that she had undertaken a journey from which no one has yet returned, regardless of how much those left longing push the clocks ahead to hasten the moment of reunion or how many chalk marks they make on the door.

Matýsek persuaded himself of his self-deception that Barka had gone to Vambeřice only before others. When he stepped before his God he acknowledged the truth. He no longer sat among the married men in the pews at the right, but cowered in the corridor among the beggars who have no one or nothing. There he fell on his knees, pressed the rosary to his lips and those, who stood near him heard nothing else during the entire mass except his whispered prayer. “For my dead Barbara, my dead Barbara—”

But when he left the church, he again tried somehow to talk himself out of the fact of her death and whomever he met he asked if they had not met Barka somewhere, and scolded to them that what was too much really was too much, that his wife refused to come back home from the pilgrimage.

And the people did not seek to change him, but assented that it was indeed a burden to have such a roaming wife. Many advised him to leave her where she was and not let her into the house even if she would come back instantly. He nodded in agreement and looked forward to her pleading to be let in. He made up his mind that he would let her beg a long time at the door before he would open it. But—whenever he