"I'll come back," I said earnestly, through the soft, intrusive darkness.
"Perhaps you will"--I felt rather than saw her smile. "But even if you
don't, you're here, like my father. So I won't be lonesome."
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that
a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing
and whispering to each other in the grass.
BOOK V--CUZAK'S BOYS
I
I TOLD Antonia I would come back, but life intervened, and it was twenty
years before I kept my promise. I heard of her from time to time; that she
married, very soon after I last saw her, a young Bohemian, a cousin of
Anton Jelinek; that they were poor, and had a large family. Once when I
was abroad I went into Bohemia, and from Prague I sent Antonia some
photographs of her native village. Months afterward came a letter from
her, telling me the names and ages of her many children, but little else;
signed, "Your old friend, Antonia Cuzak." When I met Tiny Soderball in
Salt Lake, she told me that Antonia had not "done very well"; that her
husband was not a man of much force, and she had had a hard life. Perhaps
it was cowardice that kept me away so long. My business took me West
several times every year, and it was always in the back of my mind that I
would stop in Nebraska some day and go to see Antonia.
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