s ready enough to pay for this
gratification of his own vanity.

After the banquet, dancing would begin and would be kept up half the
night. Then the next morning was the wedding-day. The wedding Mass in
the morning, then the breakfast, more dancing, more revelling, more
jollification, also kept up throughout the night. For it is only on the
day following, that the bridegroom goes to fetch his bride out of her
home, to conduct her to his own with all the pomp and circumstance which
his wealth allows. So many carts, so many oxen, so many friends in the
carts, and so many gipsies to make music while the procession slowly
passes up the village street.

All that was, of course, already arranged for. The banquet for to-morrow
was prepared, the ox roasted whole, the pigs and the capons stuffed.
Eros Bela had provided everything, and provided most lavishly. Fifty
persons would sit down to the farewell banquet, and more like two
hundred to the wedding-breakfast; the village was agog with excitement,
gipsies from Arad had been engaged, my lord the Count and the Countess
were coming to the wedding Mass! . . . how could one feeble, weak,
ignorant girl set her will against this torrent?

Elsa, conscious of her helplessness, set to with aching heart, but
unwavering determination to put the past entirely behind her.

What was the good of thinking, since Fate had already arranged
everything?

She went to bed directly after the Pater went away, because there was
no more candle in the house, and because her mother kept calling
querulously to her; and having stretched her young limbs out upon the
hard paillasse, she slept quite peacefully, because she was young and
healthy and did not suffer from nerves, and because sorrow had made her
very weary.

And the next morning, the dawn of the first of those all-important three
days, found her busy, alert, quite calm outwardly, even though her
cheeks had lost something of their rosy hue, and her blue eyes had a
glitter in them which suggested unshed tears.

There was a lot to do, of course: the invalid to get ready, the mother's
dressing to see to, so that she should not look slovenly in her
appearance, and call forth some of those stinging remarks from Bela
which had the power to wound the susceptibilities of his fiancee.

Irma was captious and in a tearful humour, bemoaning the fact that she
was too poor to pay for her only daughter's farewell repast.

"Whoever heard of a bridegroom