Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/357

 nothing else but the inquiry, “Oh! Staza, and thou dost not sing any more.”

Staza quivered at these words, glanced up at him, and then looked on the ground: glanced up at him with a gleam in her eyes which he had never seen there before, with fervour so that her bosom was expanded and was penetrated by it. And when she glanced down to the ground she did not raise her eyes any more, but from the heaving of her own bosom it was evident that this gleam of light and fervour had elevated her whole existence.

Frank was melancholy; what he had said did not satisfy him, and he could not think of anything else. Even Staza was melancholy, because she could not find anything to say at all: but after a brief pause she threw herself at full length on the grass, a deep sigh escaped from her bosom, and then she quickly rose to her feet and, without casting one glance at Frank, ran lightly away.

Perhaps she at last told her mother what she wanted to say.

Frank scarcely ventured to glance at her as she ran away, and still less ventured to ask himself the question why she ran away. And he sat down exactly on the place where she had been seated a moment before, only that he looked toward the wicket-gate and then called to mind how he had come to the cemetery the first time with the measure for his grandfather’s grave. And then he called to mind how he had slept in his grandfather’s grave, and how he and Staza had nestled together. And all at once he started as though something had stung him in his heart.

And now Staza and Frank avoided one another, or, more properly, they sought one another, but when they ought to have found one another they did not find one another, and when they found one another they were melancholy and sought one another once more. They who had grown side by side like two flower-stems, only now became conscious that they were side by side, and began to separate from one another in order that they might yearn for one another’s presence.

When at even Staza worked in the living-room, certainly Frank was not there, and wandered somewhere under the window or outside the burial-ground, in the fields, perhaps even in the woods, God knows where. And if Frank was in the living-room, Staza would rather have laid her down beside the charnel-house than have been at the same time in the same room with him; and again she glanced into his eyes, which were so clear and fervent.

And yet again, sometimes, when by accident they met one another, it seemed to them as though there could not be in the Rh