Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/339

 seated in a spot which might be called a cemetery, a grave. But with all its closeness, it was so magnificent and so beautiful, with all its dusky twilight it was so open and so free that her soul, although it had them not, yet felt on itself a kind of pinions, so that it fluttered and was carried aloft and even took Frank’s spirit with it, so that both fluttered together.

Again it was otherwise, when they ceased to listen to the murmur of the woodlands, when they ceased to look at all that grandeur, when before their soul the ha-haing of that organ was mute, and trivial things emerged—things easily comprehensible. Here was the call note of the cuckoo, here a butterfly, a beetle, a fly. Here Staza again found speech, here words came to her; at sight of these trivial things she again found herself, and here she would in a little time have again given way to dancing and singing.

So then this world was to Staza strange, new, and yet extremely welcome. Although Frank used to go for her, and so ought to have been her guide, she took upon herself the role of cicerone and played her part famously. She led Frank from tree to tree, and every tree was like the resting place of some pretty conceit. What she and Frank failed to find when roving through the fields, seemed to find a voice among these gnarled trees, as though it called aloud “Then it is just so.”