thing but an orphan?” and her eyes still moist with weeping turned from the vague distance to him, and were full of mute reproach.
“Nay, I do not drive you from me, but I want you to go to school, and to school you must go, for you are not twelve years old like me”, said Venik.
“I don’t want to go to school any more,” retorted Krista, “I like to be here on the hill-side, and stay here I will.”
“And where will you learn to sing?” asked Venik as a last resource.
“With you”, said Krista, and this quite beat Venik what to say next.
However, he answered, “You might go to school, and after school come here on the hill-side. Lord! how we should get on if you learnt at school and here as well!”
At these words Krista fell a-thinking, then she looked at Venik, took him by the hand and said, “You are right, I will do so. I will go to school, and after school I will come to you on the hill-side.”
Thus did these two young diplomatists come to a mutual understanding. And when both were satisfied, Venik said, “Are you still a poor orphan girl, Krista?”
“You know that I am an orphan, I have neither papa nor mamma”, she said, and Venik felt again so sorry, that he thought he must still try to do something for Krista to make her less an orphan.
And he said, “I have no mother either.” He said it as if he gloried in it, and as if he made Krista a sort of present, and as if that present was the mother whom he had lost.
Venik thought then that he had effected in Krista what he wanted to effect in her. Renouncing his own mother, he laid that renunciation in the balance, and Krista seemed by so much nearer to him. He glorie in his own orphanhood that Krista might bear to be an orphan more easily. He discarded his own mother as though he would discard even life itself for Krista’s sake.
Krista’s case was indeed different. She had never seen Venik’s mother; she had not known her, and so she thought that at the Rihas’s there had never been a Mrs. Riha, and that Venik all his life had never had a mother. But now when Venik announced his loss, Krista perceived that what he did not possess he had really lost. “Did they bury your mamma?” asked Krista, as if all at once his misfortune presented itself to her imagination.
“They did not bury her,” said Venik, “because I was still quite little and it was winter, but in the cemetery she lies for all that.”
