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."
Uros stood there for some time as if bewildered and very much like a man who had seen a ghost, afraid to look round lest he should see Vranic's face gloating upon him; then shuddering, he ran upstairs to tell his adoptive brother all that had happened, and the strange vision he had seen.
When Uros went up on deck, he found that the wind had greatly increased, and that from a cap-full, as it had been in the beginning, it had grown into a hurricane. The sky was even darker than before; the waves, swollen into huge breakers, dashed against the prow of the ship, making her stagger and reel as if she had been stunned by those mighty blows.