hered in her eyes--tears of self-pity at the misery
which she seemed to be strewing all round her with a free hand.

"I don't think that I really meant to tell you, Elsa," she said more
quietly, "not lately, at any rate. Oh, I dare say at first I did mean to
hurt you--but a month has gone by and I was beginning to forget. People
used to say of me that I was a good sort--it was the hurt that _he_ did
me that seems to have made a devil of me. . . . And then--just now when
I saw the other folk coming home in the procession and noticed that you
and Andor weren't among them, I guessed that you would be walking back
together arm-in-arm--and that the whole world would be smiling on you
both, while I was eating out my heart in misery."

She was speaking with apparent calm now, in a dull and monotonous voice,
her eyes fixed upon the distant line of the horizon, where the glowing
sun had at last sunk to rest. The brilliant orange and blood-red of the
sky had yielded to a colder crimson tint--it, too, was now slowly
turning to grey.

Elsa stood silent, listening, and Andor no longer tried to force Klara
to silence. What was the good? Fate had spoken through her lips--God's
wrath, perhaps, had willed it so. For the first time in all these weeks
he realized that perhaps he had committed a deadly sin, and that he had
had no right to reckon on happiness coming to him, because of it. He
stood there, dazed, letting the Jewess have her way. What did it matter
how much more she said? Perhaps, on the whole, it was best that Elsa
should learn the whole truth now.

And Klara continued to speak in listless, apathetic tones, letting her
tongue run on as if she had lost control over what she said, and as if a
higher Fate was forcing her to speak against her will.

"I suppose," she said thoughtfully, "that some kind of devil did get
into my bones then. I wandered out into the stubble, and I saw you
together coming from the distance. The sunlight was full upon you, and
long before you saw me I saw your faces quite distinctly. There was so
much joy, so much happiness in you both, that I seemed to see it shining
out of your eyes. And I was so broken and so wretched that I couldn't
bear to see Andor so happy with the girl who rightly belonged to
Bela--the wretched man whom he himself had sent to his death."

"Whom he himself had sent to his death?" broke in Elsa quietly. "What do
you mean, Klara?"

"I mean that it was young Count Feri who was