ould have to be married without a proper send-off, that's all."

"And a nice thing it would have been! Whoever heard of a girl on this
side of the Maros being married without her farewell to maidenhood. I am
paying for the supper and for everything because I want my bride's
farewell to be finer and grander than anything that has ever been seen
for many kilometres round. I have stinted nothing--begrudged nothing. I
have given an ox, two pigs and a calf to be slaughtered for the
occasion. I have given chickens and sausages and some of the finest
flour the countryside can produce. As for the wine . . . well! all I can
say is that there is none better in my lord's own cellar. I have given
all that willingly. I did it because I liked it. But," he added, and
once again the look of self-satisfaction and sufficiency gave way to his
more habitual sinister expression, "if I pay for the feast, I decide who
shall be invited to eat it."

Irma apparently had nothing to say in response. She shrugged her
shoulders and continued to stir the stew in her pot. Elsa said nothing
either; obedient to the command of her future lord, she had faced him
and listened to him attentively and respectfully all the while that he
spoke, nor did her face betray anything of what went on within her soul,
anything of its revolt or of its wounded pride, while the storm of wrath
and of sneers thus passed unheeded over her head.

But Bela, having worked himself up into a fit of obstinate rage, was not
content with Elsa's passive obedience. There had from the first crept
into his half-educated but untutored and undisciplined mind the
knowledge that though Elsa was tokened to him, though she was
submissive, and gentle and even-tempered, her heart did not belong to
him. He knew but little about love, believed in it still less: in that
part of the world a good many men are still saturated with the Oriental
conception of a woman's place in the world, and even in the innermost
recesses of their mind with the Oriental disbelief in a woman's soul;
but in common with all such men he had a burning desire to possess every
aspiration and to know every thought of the woman whom he had chosen for
his wife.

Therefore now, when in response to his rage and to his bombast Elsa had
only silence for him--a silence which he knew must hide her real
thoughts, he suddenly lost all sense of proportion and of prudence; for
the moment he felt as if he could hate this woman whom he h