The gardener hesitated a moment, then he said:

"Not from carelessness, poor woman."

In an instant Panna was on her feet, stood beside the gardener at a
single bound, grasped him by the shoulder, and said in a firm, harsh
voice, while her tears suddenly ceased to flow: "Not from carelessness,
you say? Then it was intentional?"

The gardener nodded silently.

"That is impossible, it cannot be, no innocent person is murdered, and
I am certain that Pista has done nothing; he was the gentlest man in
the world, he wouldn't harm a fly, he hadn't drunk a drop of wine in
five years, he-- Have no regard for me! Tell me everything, and may
God reward you for remaining with me in this hour."

The gardener could no longer withhold the truth, and acquainted her
with the occurrence whose commencement the coachman Janos had described
to him on the way, whose tragical close he himself had witnessed.
Panna listened silently, never averting her eyes from the body during
the entire story. In the midst of a sentence from the gardener, she
suddenly uttered a shriek, and again threw herself upon the dead man.

"Here, here is the hole!" she murmured. "Horrible! horrible!"

Hitherto she had had before her eyes only a vague, shapeless,
blood-stained vision, without being able to distinguish any details;
now for the first time she had seen, amid the blood and oozing brains,
the terrible wound in the forehead. But this interruption lasted only
a moment, then Panna again stood beside the gardener and begged him to
continue.

He soon reached the catastrophe, which once more drew a scream, or
rather a quickly suppressed, gasping sound, from the widow, and then
closed with a few well-meant, but clumsy, words of consolation.

Here Panna interrupted him.

"That's enough, Friend, that's enough; now I know how it all was and I
will comfort myself. If you have anything to do, don't stay with me
longer, and may God reward you for what you have done."

"What do you mean to do now?" asked the gardener, deeply moved.

"Nothing. I mean a great many things. I have much to do."

She went into the kitchen and soon came back with a wooden water-pail
and a coarse linen towel. Placing the vessel on the floor beside the
corpse, she began to wash the face, without taking any farther notice
of her visitor. During her melancholy task she only murmured from time
to time in broken sentences; "Oh, God, oh, God!--No, God is not
just--Pista, the