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 there,” she pointed at the portrait between the windows, “that’s he, my husband. He looks so stern,—that was his habit, but his heart was golden. Here you see him once more.” She took down from the wall an ambrotype: “You, my dear one, are resting in the Lord!” and she shook her head over it.

“And this Jiří is just like him: he growls and gets angry, but that is only his shell; the kernel is gold, gold, I tell you,” and the old lady continued in that strain.

Jiří was in the meantime sleeping, in his room that had been changed to the other end of the corridor. She told of his childhood, his parents, the town where Jiří had a mill and an estate,—she spoke with the pleagure of a person who had for a long time been deprived of her full say.

Then, without saying a word, an old wizened servant cleared off the table and, measuring Lucy with the eye of a basilisk, put upon the table linen, cloth, patterns,