Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/87

 notices the slightest thing wrong by the way, he makes a sign to the others and leads them on byways and paths where spies daren’t go. I am now meeting them in the woods of Kriesdorf, near the “bonny well.” Matouš himself usually meets me there with his bundle; he doesn’t get on with the other women.’

They had stolen out of the house during this conversation and taken to the woods. Then they walked along in silence.

Vendulka felt the cold, deep, damp darkness of the woods enfolding her, and heard the eerie rustling, sighing and groaning overhead, without knowing whence these strange, mysterious sounds came. Were they really produced by firs and larches, or was there something else sorrowing between heaven and earth? Cold shudders were running down her spine. Sometimes she felt as though she were walking at the bottom of a deep lake, and the waters were moaning over her head. She thought of a fairy tale which a tenant in her father’s house used to tell her on the seat by the stove, on winter nights:

‘There was once a town which was suddenly engulfed, and a lake appeared in its place—and all this happened because the town had harboured a traitor. It is said that to this day