Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/25

 However, he answered, “You might go to school, and after school come here on the hill side. Lord! how we should get on if you learnt at school and here as well!”

At these words Krista fella thinking, then she looked at Venik, took him by the hand and said, “You are right, I will do so. I will go to school, and after school I will come to you on the hill side.”

Thus did these two young diplomatists come to a mutual understanding. And when both were satisfied, Venik said, “Are you still a poor orphan girl, Krista?”

“You know that I am an orphan. I have neither papa nor mamma,” she said, and Venik felt again so sorry, that he thought he must still try to do something for Krista to make her less an orphan.

And he said, “I have no mother either.” He said it as if he gloried in it, and as if he made Krista a sort of present, and as if that present was the mother whom he had lost.

Venik thought then that he had effected in Krista what he wanted to effect in her. Renouncing his own mother, he laid that renunciation in the balance, and Krista seemed by so much the nearer to him. He gloried in his own orphanhood that Krista might bear to be an orphan more easily. He discarded his own mother as though he would discard even life itself for Krista’s sake.

Krista’s case was indeed different. She had never