bt the Pater had given her permission to
go out that way. From the presbytery garden she could skirt the fields
and round the top of the village, and thus get home and give all her
friends the slip.

This, no doubt, she had done, for no one saw her the whole of that day,
nor the next, which was the day of the funeral, and an occasion of
wonderful pomp and ceremony. Bela's brother had arrived in the meanwhile
from Arad, where he was the manager of an important grain store, and he
it was who gave all directions and all the money necessary that his
brother should have obsequies befitting his rank and wealth.

The church was beautifully decorated: there were huge bunches of white
flowers upon the altar, and eight village lads carried the dead man to
his last resting-place; and no less than thirty Masses were ordered to
be said within the next year for the repose of the soul of one who in
life had enjoyed so much prosperity and consideration.

And in the tiny graveyard situated among the maize-fields to the north
of Marosfalva, and which is the local Jewish burial ground, the suicide
was quietly laid to rest. There was no religious service, for there was
no minister of his religion present; an undertaker came down from Arad
and saw to it all; there was no concourse of people, no singing, no
flowers. Ignacz Goldstein--home the day before from Kecskemet--alone
followed the plain deal coffin on its lonely journey from the village to
the field.

It was the shop assistant who had seen to it all. He had gone up to Arad
and seen a married sister of his late master's--Sara Rosen, whose
husband kept a second-hand clothes shop there, and who gave full
instructions to an undertaker whilst declaring herself unable--owing to
delicate health--to attend the funeral herself.

The undertaker had provided a cart and a couple of oxen and two men to
lift the coffin in and out. They came late on the Thursday evening, at
about eight o'clock, and drew up at the back of the late Leopold
Hirsch's shop. No one was about and the night was dark.

Slowly the cart, creaking on its wheels and axles, wound its way through
some maize stubble, up a soft, sandy road to the enclosed little bit of
ground which the local Jews have reserved for themselves.

And the mysterious veil which divides the present from the past fell
quickly over this act of the village tragedy, as it had done with pomp
and circumstance after the banquet which followed the laying t