All at once remembering that it was midnight—the moment when the old year passes into oblivion and the new one rises from chaos—his hand fell, and he stood for a while, pale, shuddering, and staring upon vacancy. But—recalled to himself—he endeavoured to retrace the long string of thoughts that had flitted through his brain, since he had left the captain and Milenko up to the moment that he had looked upon the glass, and Vranic was not amongst them. His brain had been rather muddled by sleepiness and brandy, and he had hardly been thinking about anything.
Having lifted up the glass to the height of his face, he for a moment held his head averted, for he had really not the courage to look upon it.
After a while he shrugged his shoulders, muttering to himself: "I have always been thinking of Milena, and of the last days I passed at home, so that now this man's face—such as I had seen it on Christmas morning—has been impressively recalled to my mind. It must be this and nothing more."
Still, the moment when he tried again to look upon the glass, a vague terror came over him, and all his courage passed away; it was just as if he were looking upon some unhallowed thing, as if he were indulging in witchcraft. But curiosity prevailed once more, and as he did so, a trepidation came all over his limbs. This time he was surely not mistaken; it was no vision of his overheated fancy, seen with his mind's eye; sleepiness and the effect of the brandy had quite passed away, and still the glass—instead of reflecting his own features—was the living portrait of the man he hated. There he was, with his low forehead, his livid complexion, his pale greyish-green eyes, his high cheekbones and his flat nose.
He was almost impelled to dash down the glass and break it into pieces, but still he durst not do it; a superstitious fear stopped him; it was, as we all know, so very unlucky to break a looking-glass by accident, but to break it of his own free will must be far worse.
He now kept his eyes riveted upon the tiny mirror, and then he saw Vranic's face slightly fade and then vanish away; then the glass for a few seconds grew dim as if a damp breath had passed upon it; then the dimness disappeared little by little, the glass again grew clear and reflected his own pale face, with his eyes wildly opened, glistening with a wild, feverish look. Now, he was not mistaken; Vranic was not to see another year!
Uros had often heard it said that, if a young unmarried man looks by chance in a looking-glass at the stroke of twelve, just when the old year is dying out, he will perhaps see, either the woman he is to marry in the course of the year, Death, or a man of his acquaintance doomed to die within the year. He had never tried it, because it is a thing that has to be done by chance, and even then the mirror does not always foretell the future. Now, the thing happened so naturally, in such an unforeseen, unpremeditated way, that there was no possibility of a doubt. Vranic, then, was doomed to die.
A week before, his death had been predicted the moment when he stumbled and slipped over the stump of the yule-log—aye, it was his own log—now again his enemy's death was foretold to him.
As he stood there with his glass in his hand, a thought struck him, and in answer to this, he lifted his eyes upwards and begged his patron saint to keep his hands clean, and not to make him the instrument of his enemy's death.
"He is a villain," muttered he to himself, "and he fully deserves a thousand deaths; but let him not die by my hand. If he dies of a violent death, let me not be his executioner."