be a count at least."

"Lora, dear, gypsies never bear titles," remarked Aunt Lucas,
patronizingly.

"How about the Abbe Liszt?" triumphantly asked her charge.

Aunt Lucas laughed coldly. "Liszt was Hungarian, not Romany. But your
artist with the drumsticks certainly is distinguished-looking. If he
only would not wear that odious scarlet uniform. I wonder why he does
not sit down, like the rest of his colleagues."

Arpad Vihary leaned against the panelled wall, his brow puckered in
boredom, his long black mustaches drooping from sheer discouragement.
His was a figure for sculpture--a frame powerfully modelled, a bisque
complexion. Thin as a cedar sapling, he preserved such an immovable
attitude that in the haze of the creamy atmosphere he seemed a carved,
marmoreal image rather than a young man with devouring eyes.

The three visitors ate sandwiches and pretended to relish Munich beer
served in tall stone mugs. Aunt Lucas, who was shaped like a 'cello,
made more than a pretence of sipping; she drank one entirely,
regretting the exigencies of chaperonage: to ask for more might shock
the proper young man.

"It's horrid here, after all," she remarked discontentedly. "So many
people--_such_ people--and very few nice ones. The Batsons are over
there, Lora; but then you don't care for them. O dear, I wish the band
would strike up again."

It did. A vicious swirl of colour and dizzy, dislocated rhythms prefaced
the incantations of the Czardas. Instantly the eating, gabbling crowd
became silent. Alfassy Janos magnetized his hearers with cradling,
caressing movements of his fiddle. He waved like tall grass in the wind;
he twisted snakewise his lithe body as he lashed his bow upon the
screaming strings; the resilient tones darted fulgurantly from
instrument to instrument. After chasing in circles of quicksilver, they
all met with a crash; and the whole tonal battery, reenforced by the
throbbing of Arpad Vihary's dulcimer, swept through the suite of rooms
from ceiling to sanded floor. It was no longer enchanting music, but
sheer madness of the blood; sensual and warlike, it gripped the
imagination as these tunes of old Egypt, filtered through savage
centuries, reached the ears. Lora trembled in the gale that blew across
the Puzta. She imagined a determined Hungarian prairie, over which
dashed disordered centaurs brandishing clubs, driving before them a band
of satyrs and leaping fauns. The hoofed men struggled. At their f