"Now go to your room, or rather to your little garden, and think over what I've just been saying. Write first of all in your copy book: 'Fathers have their children's welfare more at heart than the children themselves.' Yet the decision shall rest with you alone. Your fate is in your own hands. I'll do no violence to your feelings. If indeed there be really more strength in your heart than I ever anticipated, show it now! If you have the courage to knit your life to those who work in blood, give us a specimen of it at home here. You have two pretty doves in a cage. I bought them for you on your birthday. Slaughter them with your own hand and make some broth of them; you may prepare it any way you like. It doesn't matter to me now. I shall then know your decision. Go now, and think the matter over!"
Pretty Michal went down into the garden and walked to and fro among the rose trees. In the middle of the path was the dovecote, and in it were the two fan-tailed pigeons which she had to slaughter, she who had never had the heart to kill so much as a kitchen fly. If she could have had her own way she would have liked everyone to have been a vegetarian. And now she was to kill her favorite doves.
She had no one to whom she could turn for advice, no one to whom she could pour out her griefs. Here was a case in which neither the philosophers, nor the calf-bound polyhistors, nor yet her daily playfellows, the flowers, could be of the slightest assistance. She had no other friends than the flowers, and they could only tell her what they knew themselves, e. g., that the virginal lily loves the garlic, although the one exhales perfumes and the other stinks; and the noble anthora withers away whenever it is planted beside the najollus for although the latter certainly has splendid blossoms, (the corolla is a helmet whereon sit two doves), it nevertheless brings destruction upon its fair neighbor—and so on ad nauseam.
And then she began thinking that perhaps the feeling which had been nourished in her breast by this exchange correspondence was not exactly love after all. She had only seen the young man from afar, only spoken to him in her dreams. She might easily renounce him. She had no mother to tell her difficulties to, and from her father she had learnt nothing but cold prudence. Mathematics is a pitiless science. According to mathematics, love is not a number which counts, but a mere cipher. Among geometrical figures you will find every conceivable shape but nothing in the shape of a heart. She could get no further information about her lover. The games of ball in the market-place were now forbidden, and who knew but what poor Valentine was locked up besides? It was so easy to find a pretext. Perhaps he had renounced her himself already. Perhaps he had gone back to his native place.
Should she therefore sacrifice her favorite doves for his sake?
At noon the same day Michal brought both the doves to her father, not roasted or stewed on a dish, but alive in their cage, whereupon the professor kissed his dutiful little daughter on both cheeks.
Three weeks later he united pretty Michal and Henry Catsrider in holy wedlock, and gave them both his parental as well as his sacerdotal blessing.
Valentine Kalondai had had no opportunity of doing anything desperate in the meantime. After the assembled Consistory had publicly upbraided him for all the sins he had hitherto committed—to wit: his dancing in the woods; his keeping a big dog; his propensity to all kinds of idle jesting; his playing truant at church; his consorting with fiddlers and trumpeters; tussling with night watchmen; making the beadle drunk and dressing him up in woman's clothes; smoking in the streets, etc.—he was sent to jail for a week, and then solemnly expelled from the Keszmár Lyceum with the consilium abeundi, and thus prevented from doing anything whereby he might perhaps have prevented the consummation of his rival's wedding. So the ceremony was performed without let or stay, and pretty Michal became the wife of the man who tended the Lord's flock instead of the man who slaughtered the sheep.