Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/280

 Barushka he proffered her his glass indeed, but the glass remained in his hand, and the polite speech remained unspoken.

Into the midst of all that whistling, tootling, and babbling of tongues a knife had worked its way, and smitten all with a sudden blow. Two childish little voices had taken upon themselves to hew down an ogre, and the ogre shivered and reeled to the ground. A morsel of genuine feeling claimed a hearing, and what was untrue and unnatural tumbled to pieces like a house of cards.

The grandfather still had the last word to-day. He spoke by the mouths of those children who constrained even the harpers and fiddlers to their cause, and all that gay company in the dining room again knew that it was the day of his funeral. Not gladly certainly, but no one could say, I do not know it.