Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/114

 This outcome of his folly had so roused his father’s anger that he ordered him out of the house and disinherited him. These things will happen! For whom does a father work and worry from morning till night, if not for his children? What right had a foolish boy, dependent on his father, to spoil his whole future by one careless act?

That Ivan Hron had spoilt his, was father’s firm conviction, and he succeeded in convincing his mother too. With this conviction old Hron died.

And Ivan? When he was in these desperate straits, he knocked at the doors of a Great Bank where clerks were wanted. He obtained work, and dedicated his mind and body to the concern for the salary of thirty florins. It was not long before his superiors found out that he had not wasted his time at the public school where he had spent the greater part of his life, nor during the two years at the university when studying law. Evidently he had after all not entirely spoilt his future outlook. His immediate superiors recommended him to the higher authorities as an eminently ‘useful’ young man, and Ivan Hron got preferment. But his humbler colleagues had no idea of the surprise which