his first thought had been to kill, his second to seize his
love with both arms and to carry her away with him, away from this
village, from this land, if need be. After all, she was not yet a wife,
and the promise of marriage is not so sacred nor yet so binding as a
marriage vow.

He could carry her away, leaving the scandal-mongers to work their way
with her and him: he could carry her to that far-off land which he knew
already, where work was hard and money plentiful, and no one would have
the right to look down on her for what she had done. But seeing her
there, looking so helpless and so pathetic, he knew, by that unerring
intuition which only comes to a man at such times as this, that such a
dream could never be fulfilled. The future was as it was, as no doubt it
had been pre-ordained by God and by Fate: nothing that he could do or
say now would have the power to alter it. Tradition, filial duty and
perhaps a certain amount of womanly weakness too, were all ranged up
against him; but filial duty would fight harder than anything else and
would remain the conqueror in the end.

The relentless hand of the Inevitable was already upon him, and because
of it, because of that vein of Oriental fatalism which survives in every
Hungarian peasant, the tumult in his soul had already subsided, and he
was able to speak to Elsa now with absolute gentleness.

"So to-day is your maiden's farewell, is it?" he asked after awhile.

"Yes! It must be getting late," she said, as she rose from the low stool
and shook out her many starched skirts, "mother will be back directly to
fetch me for the feast."

"It will be in the schoolroom, I suppose," he said indifferently.

"Yes. And some of the lads are coming over presently to fetch father.
They have arranged to carry him all the way. Isn't it good of them?"

"To carry him all the way?" he asked, puzzled.

"Father has not moved for two years," she said simply; "he was stricken
with paralysis, you know."

"Ah, yes! Klara told me something about that."

"So in order to give me the pleasure of having father near me at my
farewell feast, Moritz and Jeno and Imre and Janko are going to fasten
long poles to his chair and carry him to the schoolroom and back. Isn't
it good of them? And I think they mean to do the same thing to-morrow
and carry him to church. We are going to put his bunda round his
shoulders. He has not worn his bunda for two years. . . . It was
yesterday, when I took