This was to start the next morning at once after the votive Mass had been sung; and all were now slowly assembling, so that the road by the mill-pond was crowded with carts. A great many, too, had gone to the priest’s bureau, and Yanek had to stay and help his Reverence in settling many various matters. It was only quite at evening that he found a convenient time to take his book and slip out behind the barn and to that pear-tree under which he had once sat together with Yagna. He never opened the book at all, but threw it somewhere away into the grass. Then, looking round the fields, he entered the rye; and stealthily, almost creeping on all fours, he made his way to Dominikova’s garden. And Yagna was there just then, digging up new potatoes. She had no notion that anyone was gazing at her. Now and then she would draw herself up wearily, look about her with very mournful eyes, and utter a long and heavy sigh. “Yagna!” he exclaimed timidly. She turned suddenly pale as a sheet of canvas, scarcely believing her own eyes, and well-nigh regarding him as a miraculous vision. Yanek’s eyes were filled with light, and his heart with the sweetness of honey. But, mastering himself, he only sat down in silence, gazing upon her with an irresistible sense of delight. “I feared I should never see you again, Master Yanek!” As a scented breeze, blowing up from the meadows upon him, so was the sound of her voice to his soul, thrilled with inexpressible rapture! “Yesterday evening, outside the Klembas’ house, ye would not even look at me!” She stood before him, flushed like a rose-bush in flower; like a spray of apple-blossoms, all drooping with desire; full of comeliness and altogether lovely. “And I thought my heart would break!” she added, tears standing like diamonds on her long eyelashes, and veiling the dark azure of the heavens behind. “Yagna!” he cried; it was a cry from the core of his inmost heart. She knelt down in a furrow close by and, pressing close to his knees, fixed upon him the fiery depths of her eyes—those eyes as clear, yet as unfathomable, as the sky—those eyes whose looks went to the head like kisses, or the caresses of a beloved hand—those eyes instinct at once with subtle temptation and with absolute simplicity. With a violent effort to shake himself free from the spell she was casting over him, he spoke to her sternly and recounted all the sins and evil deeds of which his mother had told him. She drank in all his words eagerly, her eyes fastened upon him, but scarcely at all understanding what he said, absorbed as she was in the one feeling and knowledge and consciousness of his being by her side—he, the chosen of her soul amongst all!—of his saying something, of his eyes gleaming bright; and of her kneeling before him as before the image of a saint, and praying to him with the deep, deep faith of love! “Say now,” he concluded with energetic entreaty, “say, Yagna, say of all this: ’Tis untrue!”