Swithin swallowed a misgiving, and entered. The room had a worn
appearance by daylight, as if it had always been the nest of tragic or
vivid lives. He sat down, and his eyes said: "I am a stranger, but don't
try to get the better of me, please--that is impossible." The girls
looked at him in silence. Rozsi wore a rather short skirt of black
stuff, a white shirt, and across her shoulders an embroidered yoke; her
sister was dressed in dark green, with a coral necklace; both girls had
their hair in plaits. After a minute Rozsi touched the sleeve of his
hurt arm.

"It's nothing!" muttered Swithin.

"Father fought with a chair, but you had no chair," she said in a
wondering voice.

He doubled the fist of his sound arm and struck a blow at space. To his
amazement she began to laugh. Nettled at this, he put his hand beneath
the heavy table and lifted it. Rozsi clapped her hands. "Ah I now I
see--how strong you are!" She made him a curtsey and whisked round to
the window. He found the quick intelligence of her eyes confusing;
sometimes they seemed to look beyond him at something invisible--this,
too, confused him. From Margit he learned that they had been two years
in England, where their father had made his living by teaching languages;
they had now been a year in Salzburg.

"We wait," suddenly said. Rozsi; and Margit, with a solemn face,
repeated, "We wait."

Swithin's eyes swelled a little with his desire to see what they were
waiting for. How queer they were, with their eyes that gazed beyond him!
He looked at their figures. 'She would pay for dressing,' he thought,
and he tried to imagine Rozsi in a skirt with proper flounces, a thin
waist, and hair drawn back over her ears. She would pay for dressing,
with that supple figure, fluffy hair, and little hands! And instantly
his own hands, face, and clothes disturbed him. He got up, examined the
pistols on the wall, and felt resentment at the faded, dusty room.
'Smells like a pot-house!' he thought. He sat down again close to Rozsi.

"Do you love to dance?" she asked; "to dance is to live. First you hear
the music--how your feet itch! It is wonderful! You begin slow,
quick--quicker; you fly--you know nothing--your feet are in the air. It
is wonderful!"

A slow flush had mounted into Swithin's face.

"Ah!" continued Rozsi, her eyes fixed on him, "when I am dancing--out
there I see the plains--your feet go one--two--three--quick, quick,
quick, quic