as soon placed in the
terrible alternative of either being faithless to Andor or disobedient
to her mother.

And it is characteristic of that part of the world that of the two sins
thus in prospect, the latter seemed by far the more heinous.

Yet Andor was due back at the end of the summer. The fourteenth of
September came and went and the new recruits went with it--another week,
and those who had completed their three years would be coming home.
Andor would, of course, be among them. There had come no adverse report
about him, and no news during those three years is always counted to be
good news. No letters or sign of life had come from him, but, then, many
of the lads never wrote home while they did their three years, and Andor
had no one to write to. He would not be allowed to write to Elsa, or,
rather, Elsa would never be allowed to receive letters from him, and his
uncle Lakatos Pal, the old miser, would only be furious with him for
spending his few fillers on note-paper and stamps. But Elsa had waited
patiently during three years, knowing that though she had no news of
him, he would not forget her. She never mistrusted him, she never
doubted him.

She waited for him, and he did not return. At first, his non-appearance
excited neither surprise nor comment in the village. Andor had no
relations except his uncle Lakatos Pal, who did not care one brass
filler about him: there had been no one to count the years, the months,
the days when he would return: there was only Elsa who cared, and she
dared not say anything at first, for fear of making her mother angry.

But at the turn of the year Lakatos Pal became ill, and when he got
worse and worse and the doctor seemed unable to do anything to make him
well, he began to talk of his nephew, Andor.

That is to say, he bewailed the fact that his only brother's only child
was dead, and that he--a poor sick man--had no one to look after him.

He first spoke of this to Pater Bonifacius, who was greatly shocked and
upset to hear such casual news of Andor's death, and it was only bit by
bit that he succeeded in dragging fuller particulars out of the sick
man. It seems that when the lad's regiment was out in Bosnia there was
an outbreak of cholera among the troops. Andor was one of those who
succumbed. It had all occurred less than a month before his discharge
was actually due, in fact these discharges had already been distributed
to those who were sick, in the hope that th