re exiles. Those Godless dogs!" Swithin
hurriedly assented.

As he spoke, a face peeped in at the door.

"Rozsi!" said the Hungarian. A young girl came in. She was rather short,
with a deliciously round figure and a thick plait of hair. She smiled,
and showed her even teeth; her little, bright, wide-set grey eyes
glanced from one man to the other. Her face was round, too, high in the
cheekbones, the colour of wild roses, with brows that had a twist-up at
the corners. With a gesture of alarm, she put her hand to her cheek, and
called, "Margit!" An older girl appeared, taller, with fine shoulders,
large eyes, a pretty mouth, and what Swithin described to himself
afterwards as a "pudding" nose. Both girls, with little cooing sounds,
began attending to their father's face.

Swithin turned his back to them. His arm pained him.

'This is what comes of interfering,' he thought sulkily; 'I might have
had my neck broken!' Suddenly a soft palm was placed in his, two eyes,
half-fascinated, half-shy, looked at him; then a voice called, "Rozsi!"
the door was slammed, he was alone again with the Hungarian, harassed by
a sense of soft disturbance.

"Your daughter's name is Rosy?" he said; "we have it in England--from
rose, a flower."

"Rozsi (Rozgi)," the Hungarian replied; "your English is a hard tongue,
harder than French, German, or Czechish, harder than Russian, or
Roumanian--I know no more."

"What?" said Swithin, "six languages?" Privately he thought, 'He knows
how to lie, anyway.'

"If you lived in a country like mine," muttered the Hungarian, "with all
men's hands against you! A free people--dying--but not dead!"

Swithin could not imagine what he was talking of. This man's face, with
its linen bandage, gloomy eyes, and great black wisps of beard, his
fierce mutterings, and hollow cough, were all most unpleasant. He seemed
to be suffering from some kind of mental dog-bite. His emotion indeed
appeared so indecent, so uncontrolled and open, that its obvious
sincerity produced a sort of awe in Swithin. It was like being forced
to look into a furnace. Boleskey stopped roaming up and down. "You
think it's over?" he said; "I tell you, in the breast of each one of us
Magyars there is a hell. What is sweeter than life? What is more sacred
than each breath we draw? Ah! my country!" These words were uttered so
slowly, with such intense mournfulness, that Swithin's jaw relaxed; he
converted the movement to a yawn.

"Tell me,