Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/337

 before alone. On the way he had already prepared her for what she was to expect, that, as he said, she might not be too much startled. And on the way through the fields they visited various hedgerows and their trysting places, and here they had already lost half their fear and on their way through the wood there was no need to penetrate to its rocky haunts, not at all, they took the path by the outskirts of the wood, or perhaps amused themselves at the keeper’s house, and so lost the other half of their fears.

And this expedition into the wood was for Staza something unutterably charming and wonderful. From Bartos, the gravedigger, she heard how robbers fell upon him in the woods and how he defended himself. From Frank she heard how a panic seized a man when he retired to its rocky wildernesses. And when she came thither with Frank, she saw trees like giants, she heard the murmur as of a mighty river, she felt the breath of flowers, she felt the chill of the woodland, her little soul opened and something of the great unknown entered into it. It was not so smiling nor so clear as the white light of day which she saw from the cemetery, but it was just as majestic and inaccessible, so that she sat beside Frank silent and, as it were, full of reverent awe.

Neither the one nor the other knew how to express it all, but they knew so much as this—that in their