This day and this evening had such an effect upon Malka that they easily and completely expelled from her soul the image of her previous lover which, as we have observed, hung there more from habit than from any deep spiritual necessity which would have held it there so long as life lasted. Aye, there needed but a few such days and evenings and Malka turned away from Poldik as from an uncouth scarecrow, and as though she were flying from a ruined vault whose ceiling was overhung with spider-webs; and she turned to Francis as to some sunny spot of earth which would free her from the dismal gloom of the other.
I cannot disguise the fact that the relation of Malka to Francis was a very dangerous one, and that I might here fall into the temptation to weave a romantic story. For threads which entwine so lightly as the inclination towards one another entertained by Malka and Francis, generally are just as lightly blown asunder; only that on one side follows merely a sentiment of vexation, on the other complete disenchantment, if not an utter dissipation of all the hopes which make a girl cling to life.
But, indeed, we have no need of any such a romance, and in the present instance it would not be true. Francis had already repeated to Malka a hundred times that they should live together as a happy couple, man and wife, and Malka, when he said it, had a hundred times pressed his hand, as if in token of her consent. And then they had said it to each other in looks and kisses, and then a time came when neither looks nor kisses were needed to express it, for it was so firmly fixed and settled between them that they saw it as clearly as they saw the path along which they paced together.
Thus then it came to pass that in Podskali the sandsmen and the boatmen prepared for the nuptial day of Francis and Malka. They discussed it a whole week beforehand on the Quay, and were planning for a whole week how to celebrate the happy event. For Francis had always been to them like their own soul; in summer on the skiffs and on the boats, in the winter on the ice where he selected and set in order and superintended the skating-rinks over which he himself sped along like the fickle wind over field and fish-pond. For this reason people had prophesied but last summer that all his life long he would never marry, for that he was too free and joyous-hearted, too like the wind and too inconstant, and that any woman who was his wife would doom herself to a truly thorny path. And now Francis was to marry.
Thus, then, all the sandsmen and boatmen clubbed together and
