tragedy which had been enacted outside her door. She lit the
storm-lantern, then, with it in her hand, she went through the tap-room
and opened the front door.

She knew well the risks which she was running, going out like this into
the night, and alone. Any passer-by might see her--ask questions,
suspect her of connivance when she told what it was that she had come
out to seek in the darkness behind her own back door. But to this
knowledge and this small additional fear she resolutely closed her mind.
Drawing the door to behind her, she stepped out on to the verandah and
thence down the few steps into the road below.

A slight breeze had sprung up within the last half-hour, and had
succeeded in chasing away the heavy banks of cloud which had hung over
the sky earlier in the evening.

Even as Klara paused at the foot of the verandah steps in order to
steady herself on her feet, the last filmy veil that hid the face of the
moon glided ethereally by. The moon was on the wane, golden and
mysterious, and now, as she appeared high in the heaven, surrounded by a
halo of prismatic light, she threw a cold radiance on everything around,
picking out every tree and cottage with unfailing sharpness and casting
black, impenetrable shadows which made the light, by contrast, appear
yet more vivid and more clear.

All around leaves and branches rustled with a soft, swishing sound, like
the whisperings of ghosts, and from the plains beyond came that
long-drawn-out murmur of myriads of plume-crowned maize as they bent in
recurring unison to the caress of the wind.

Klara's eyes peered anxiously round. Quickly she extinguished her
lantern, and then remained for a while clinging to the wooden balusters
of the verandah, eyes and ears on the alert like a hunted beast. Two
belated csikos[7] from a neighbouring village were passing down the main
road, singing at the top of their voices, their spurred boots clinking
as they walked. Klara did not move till the murmur of the voices and the
clinking of metal had died away and no other sound of human creature
moving or breathing close by broke the slumbering echoes of the village.

[Footnote 7: Herdsmen in charge of foals.]

Only in the barn, far away, people were singing and laughing and making
merry. Klara could hear the gipsy band, the scraping of the fiddles and
banging of the czimbalom, followed now and then by one of those
outbursts of jollity, of clapping of mugs on wooden tables, of