"What do you want of me?" stammers Zdena, rising, not without secret terror.
"I should like to know what you are crying for. Perhaps because you have quarrelled with your cousin Henry," he says, with a sneer.
He addresses her familiarly: who can he be? Evidently some one of unsound mind; probably old Studnecka from X----, a former brewer, who writes poems, and who sometimes thinks himself the prophet Elisha, under which illusion he will stop people in the road and preach to them. This must be he. She has heard that so long as his fancies are humoured he is perfectly gentle and harmless, but that if irritated by contradiction he has attacks of maniacal fury, and has been known to lay violent hands upon those who thus provoke him.
Before she finds the courage to answer him, he comes a step nearer to her, and repeats his question with a scornful smile which discloses a double row of faultless teeth.
"How do you know that I have a cousin?" asks Zdena, still more alarmed, and recoiling a step or two.
"Oh, I know everything, just as the gypsies do."
"Of course this is the prophet," the girl thinks, trembling. She longs to run away, but tells herself that the prudent course will be to try to keep him in good humour until she has regained the path out of this thicket, where she has cut herself off from all human aid. "Do you know, then, who I am?" she asks, trying to smile.
"Oh, yes," replies this strange prophet, nodding his head. "I have long known you, although you do not know me. You are the foolish daughter of a foolish father."
"How should he have any knowledge of me or of my family?" she reflects. The explanation is at hand. She remembers distinctly that the prophet Studnecka was one of the eccentric crowd that Baron Franz Leskjewitsch was wont to assemble about him for his amusement during the three or four weeks each year when the old man made the country around unsafe by his stay here.
"You know my grandfather too, then?" she continues.