ls of the spindle whirr-whirr-whirred
monotonously, and Henrietta felt like a little child whose nurse sits
beside her bed and lulls her to sleep with fairy tales. For weeks she
had not enjoyed so quiet and dreamless a slumber as she had that night
beneath the roof of the _csarda_ in the midst of the lonely _puszta_.

Next morning Clementina, after first making quite sure that nobody had
had his or her throat cut during the night, was moved by curiosity to
ask what sort of connection his lordship had with this _csarda_ since he
seemed to know everybody in it. And then she learnt that not only this
_csarda_ but the whole of the surrounding _puszta_ also was the property
of his lordship, for which the people who lived upon it paid very little
rent, inasmuch as his lordship did not look upon it as a source of
income but chiefly valued it on account of its numerous reedy lakes
where he was wont every year to hunt water-fowl and beavers on a grand
scale. Moreover, from this spot to his own house, a good two days'
journey by foot, everything belonged to his lordship's estate. Nay, his
lordship, if he liked, could traverse the whole kingdom from Deva to
Pest, and be on his own property the whole time, it was only like moving
from one of his houses to another.

The next day the Hungarian plain came to an end and the Transylvanian
Alps drew nearer and nearer. In the evening they descended into a little
mining town whose forges and furnaces were all illuminated in honour of
the arriving guests. Henrietta then learnt that this mining town also
belonged to her husband.

On the third day, quite early in the morning, they crossed the
Transylvanian frontier. The whole of that splendid region seemed to
smile, but the faces of its inhabitants are sad and mysterious.
Henrietta had a peculiar sense of anxiety during her stay among these
angry looking people who spoke a language she had never heard before. At
intervals of a mile all along the road a roughly carved cross shot up,
covered with clumsily carved letters, which did not in the least
resemble those we are accustomed to. Clementina once asked the coachman
what these crosses might mean and repented doing so immediately
afterwards, for he informed her that they marked the places where
unlucky travellers had come by an untimely death; the inscriptions were
the records of the tragic romances through the scene of which they were
passing.

The valleys grew narrower and narrower, the