Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/196

 from the foliage or snow from our cloak and said to himself that it was not true.

When he went to the Horskas’s to teach his little pupils, he made it a rule never to look about him, not wishing to encounter the half-concealed smile of the servants. He completed his hour with the children, and as he came so he went away. No light step in the neighbouring rooms disturbed him. No opening of the door drove the colour from his cheeks, nothing disturbed him. The rest of the Horskas’s family had no existence for him. He saw nothing beyond the children.

Once as he was leaving the Horskas’s, at the door which led from their rooms to the kitchen, he turned round somewhat sharply, and there standing against the wall was Lidunka. The blood rushed through his veins as Lidunka looked at him. He saw that her eyes were really tear-stained. Vojtech lightly saluted her, Lidunka thanked him, and Vojtech was already in the passage. How pretty Lidunka was!

It all flashed around him, just as, when we travel by train, a tree flashes past us. If we wish to get another sight of it we cannot find it.

The second day Lidunka stood there again both when he came and when he left the house. His eyes found her at once and he saluted her just as he had done the day before. The following days he always saw Lidunka there somehow employed and she always looked about for him. Possibly she had been there all the time, though as he did not see her, he knew nothing of it. At the same time he noticed that her eyes did not seem so bedimmed, and when she thanked him, she showed signs of pleasure.

What did it all mean?

Was it all a mockery? When Vojtech now went to the Horskas’s he occupied himself all the way in wondering how Lidunka would look that day, and he pictured her so vividly that if she had once been absent he would inwardly, ay, perhaps audibly, have exclaimed, “Here Lidunka ought to be, why is she not here?”

After the summer was over Vojtech took frequent walks. He always inquired of his little pupils, in which direction Lidunka and her mother were going to take their walk, and when he had found this out, he always went in a different direction, not wishing to meet them. But his walks were very dull ones. He was so utterly lonely that he had not a single soul to talk to. Thus it once came into his head that he might take the Horskas’s little