Page:Halek's Stories and Evensongs.pdf/99

 he kissed her lips, perhaps for the first time, fervently, and with anguish bent over his little baby daughter and could not refrain from tears. He lay on his bed dressed as he had been at the dinner-party, but never slept the whole night and when he got up early in the morning and Karla raised her head from the couch he begged her almost with childish tenderness to forgive him—he had to leave her for a long time.

Karla looked at him with indifference, and when he had gone, seeing her child still asleep she also went to sleep again.

Karla had no suspicion of the blow that awaited her. Both Hurka’s property and her own had been lost at that evenings feast. Hurka had staked everything that by this new speculation he might gain everything or lose all hope. Fortune had not favoured him. Hurka lost everything. He did indeed spend the next day in going from one to another of his evening guests to collect their answers in person, but if these guests had already felt suspicion about him in the evening they trusted him less than ever next day reading sufficient warning in his restless impatience.

Pan Hurka only learned with precision what he already knew in the evening when he walked up and down his empty dining-room. The news of his failure spread like the wild-fire and before evening arrived Pan Hurka was known to be a defaulter and liable to justice for the crime of forgery.

When he came to the last of his night’s guests, this friend kept him in his house on various pretexts, and when the servant announced that “those gentlemen” were already there, he hinted to Hurka that he had better go to prison with a good grace, for all resistance would be futile, and he pointed to the half-opened door.

Karla did not feel this blow very acutely when they broke it to her. She did not understand all it implied. It never occurred to her that her fate was involved in that of her husband. She thought that her life would change only so far that she would live just as she had done hitherto, only without a husband. This did not cause her great tribulation, and to be without the means of existence was an idea she literally could not understand because all her life such a conception had never occurred to her. She looked on with surprise, however, while the commissioners put all the furniture under an official seal and when nobody paid any attention to her orders but obeyed everything which was ordered by the gentlemen in spectacles. She thought that in the evening