be to kill myself or that woman."

Kecskerey's strident rasping voice seemed to cut clean through that
desperate murmur.

"If you want to kill or be killed, my friend, I should advise you to
read Pitaval,[11] wherein you will find all sorts and kinds of tips for
murderers, including lists of poisons both vegetable and mineral, a
liberal choice of weapons of every description, and the best means of
disposing of the _corpus delecti_ afterwards, either by submersion,
combustion, dissection, or inhumation. The whole twelve volumes is a
little library of itself, and a man who reads it patiently through to
the end will easily persuade himself that he is a born murderer. I
recommend the matter to your attention. Ho, ho, ho!"

[Footnote 11: The allusion, no doubt, is to F. G. de Pitaval's "Causes
celebres et interessantes."--TR.]

To all this Abellino paid no attention. "Who can be this woman's lover?"
said he.

"Look around you, my friend, and choose for yourself."

"At least I should like to recognize and kill him."

"I am absolutely sure I know who her lover is," remarked Kecskerey.

"Who?" asked Abellino, with sparkling eyes. "Oh, that man I _should_
like to know!"

Kecskerey, who was having rare sport with him, drew his neck down
between his shoulders, and continued--"How many times have I not seen
you fall upon his neck, and kiss and embrace him!"

"Who is it, who is it?" cried Abellino, catching hold of Kecskerey's
arm.

"Would you like to know?"

"I should."

"Then it is--her husband."

"This is a stupid jest," cried Abellino, quite forgetting himself; "and
nobody will believe it. That woman loves somebody, loves some one with
shameful self-abandonment. And that old scoundrel, her husband, knows
and suffers it in order to gratify his vengeance on me. But I will find
out who he is, I will find out who it is if it be the devil himself, and
I will bring a scandalous action against this woman, the like of which
the world has never yet seen."

At that moment a loud manly voice rang out amidst the group of listeners
who were beginning to rally Abellino, and ironically beg him not to
suspect them as they were quite innocent, and could not lay claim to the
honour of making Madame Karpathy happy.

"Gentlemen," it said, "you forget that it is not becoming in men of
breeding to make ribald jests about the name of a lady whom nobody in
the world has any cause or any right to traduce."

"What, Rudolf! Why, wh