r them, but
Rozsi, with a sober "Many tanks!" as if they were her right, would look
long at herself in the glass, and pin one into her hair. Swithin ceased
to wonder; he ceased to wonder at anything they did. One evening he
found Boleskey deep in conversation with a pale, dishevelled-looking
person.

"Our friend Mr. Forsyte--Count D....," said Boleskey.

Swithin experienced a faint, unavoidable emotion; but looking at the
Count's trousers, he thought: 'Doesn't look much like one!' And with an
ironic bow to the silent girls, he turned, and took his hat. But when he
had reached the bottom of the dark stairs he heard footsteps. Rozsi came
running down, looked out at the door, and put her hands up to her breast
as if disappointed; suddenly with a quick glance round she saw him.
Swithin caught her arm. She slipped away, and her face seemed to bubble
with defiance or laughter; she ran up three steps, stopped, looked at
him across her shoulder, and fled on up the stairs. Swithin went out
bewildered and annoyed.

'What was she going to say to me?' he kept thinking. During these three
weeks he had asked himself all sorts of questions: whether he were being
made a fool of; whether she were in love with him; what he was doing
there, and sometimes at night, with all his candles burning as if he
wanted light, the breeze blowing on him through the window, his cigar,
half-smoked, in his hand, he sat, an hour or more, staring at the wall.
'Enough of this!' he thought every morning. Twice he packed fully--once
he ordered his travelling carriage, but countermanded it the following
day. What definitely he hoped, intended, resolved, he could not have
said. He was always thinking of Rozsi, he could not read the riddle in
her face--she held him in a vice, notwithstanding that everything
about her threatened the very fetishes of his existence. And Boleskey!
Whenever he looked at him he thought, 'If he were only clean?' and
mechanically fingered his own well-tied cravatte. To talk with the
fellow, too, was like being forced to look at things which had no place
in the light of day. Freedom, equality, self-sacrifice!

'Why can't he settle down at some business,' he thought, 'instead of all
this talk?' Boleskey's sudden diffidences, self-depreciation, fits of
despair, irritated him. "Morbid beggar!" he would mutter; "thank God
I haven't a thin skin." And proud too! Extraordinary! An impecunious
fellow like that! One evening, moreover, Boleske