ccur to Andor to lie to her about it all; the thought of
denial never for one moment entered his head. The fatalism peculiar to
this Oriental race made the man scorn to shield himself behind a lie.
Bela was now for ever silent; the young Count would scorn to speak! His
own protestations in the ear of this loving, simple-minded girl, against
the accusations of a woman of the despised race--jealous, bitter,
avowedly half-crazy--needed only to be uttered in order to be
whole-heartedly believed. But even the temptation to pursue such a
course never assailed his soul. With the limitless sky above him, the
vast immensity of the plains stretching out unbroken far away, with the
land under his feet and the scent of the maize-stubble in his nostrils,
he was too proud of himself as a man to stoop to such a lie.

So when Elsa spoke to him and asked him that one straight and firm
question, he raised his head and looked straight into her tear-dimmed
eyes.

"What, Elsa?" he asked quietly.

"That you let Bela go to his death--just like that--as Klara said . . .
that is not all true, is it?"

And as she returned his look--fearlessly and trustfully--she knew that
the question which she had thus put to him was really an affirmation of
what she felt must be the truth. But already Andor had raised his voice
in hot and passionate protest.

"He was a brute to you, Elsa," he affirmed with all the strength of his
manhood, the power of his love, which, in spite of all, would not
believe in its own misery; "he would have made you wretchedly unhappy
. . . he . . ."

"You did do it, then?" she broke in quietly.

"I did it because of you, Elsa," he cried, and his own firm voice was
now half-choked with sobs. "He made you unhappy even though you were not
yet bound to him by marriage. Once you were his wife he would have made
you miserable . . . he would have bullied you . . . beaten you, perhaps.
I heard him out under the verandah speaking to you like the sneering
brute that he was. . . . And then he kissed you . . . and I . . . But
even then I didn't give him the key. . . . Klara lied when she said
that. I didn't urge him to take it, even--I did not speak about the key.
It was lying on the table where I had put it--he took it up--I did not
give it him."

"But you let him take it. You knew that he meant to visit Klara, and
that Leopold was on the watch outside. Yet you let him go. . . ."

"I let him go. . . . I was nearly mad then with ra