ther, and then dear mother too: we remained alone
together, and never parted.

Lorand always lived with us: as long as we lived in town he did not
leave the house sometimes for weeks together.

The new order of things compelled me to give up the career which father
had held to be the most brilliant aim of life. I threw over my yearning
for diplomacy, and went to the plough.

I became a good husbandman.

I am that still.

Then too Lorand remained with us.

His was no longer a life, merely a counting of days.

It was piteous to know it and to see him.

A strapping figure, whose calling was to be a hero!

A warm heart, that might have been a paradise on earth to some woman!

A refined, fiery temperament that might have been the leading spirit of
some country.

Who quietly without love or happiness, faded leaf by leaf and did not
await anything from the morrow.

Yet he feared the coming days.

Often he chided me for wanting to brick up the door of that lonely
building there beside the brook.

Lest my children should ask, "what can dwell within it?" Lest they try
to discover the meaning of that hidden inscription as I had tried in my
childish days.

Lorand did not agree with the idea.

"There is still one lodging vacant in it."

And that was a horror to us all.

To him, to us too.

Every evening we parted as if saying a last adieu.

Nothing in life gave him pleasure. He took part in nothing which
interested other men. He did not play cards, or drink wine: he was ever
sober and of unchanging mood. He read nothing but mathematical books. I
could never persuade him to take a newspaper in his hand.

"The whole history of the world is one lie."

Every day, winter and summer, early in the morning, before anyone had
risen, he walked out to the cemetery, to where Czipra lay "under the
perfumed herb-roots:" spent some minutes there and then returned,
bringing in summer a blade of living grass, in winter of dried grass
from her grave.

He had a diary, in which nought was written, except the date: and pinned
underneath, in place of writing, was the dry blade of grass.

The history of a life contained in thousands of grass-blades, each blade
representing a day.

Could there be a sadder book?

The only things that interested him, were fruit trees and bees.

Animals and plants do not deceive him who loves them.

The whole day long he guarded his trees and his saplings, and waged war
against the insect