Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/32

 you. If your wife hadn’t died she would have remained single to her dying day. She has had handsome and very acceptable offers from all sides, but if I had counselled her to accept one, she would not have listened to me in the least.’

‘If one of them had dared to go past my house after he had been accepted, he would never have reached his home alive, I swear to you!’ Lukas cried with such violence that the old man shrank back frightened to death and again entreating him not to sin against God’s mercy. Lukas’s face was aflame with passion, but that became him well, very well. He was a fine fellow, this Lukas; he had an air and ways as though the whole world belonged to him.

‘Just as she never left off loving me, I have had her in my heart all the time,’ thundered the young widower, without paying any attention to those exhortations. ‘During the marriage service I could hear nothing but her sobbing in the organ loft. I was not far from leaving the bride and the priest at the altar and running up to her to take her to my heart, and no one would have torn me from her alive. It was not for the sake of the bride that I remained on the stool of repentance. I hated