e said calmly. "Someone might come, and it
would not be a very fine home-coming for Lakatos Andor, would it? to be
found crying like an infant into a woman's petticoats. Why, what would
they think? That we had quarrelled, perhaps, on this my first day at
home. God forgive me, I quite lost myself that time, didn't I? It was
foolish," he added, with heartbroken anxiety, "wasn't it, Elsa?"

"Yes, Andor," she said simply.

"It was foolish," he reiterated, still speaking calmly, even though his
voice was half-choked with sobs, "it was foolish to think that you would
turn your back on a fellow who had just lived these past five years for
you."

"It isn't that, Andor," she murmured.

"It isn't that?" he repeated dully, and once more the frown of awful
puzzlement appeared between his dark, inquiring eyes. "Then what is it?
No, no, Elsa!" he added quickly, seeing that she threw a quick look of
pathetic anxiety upon him, "don't be afraid, my dove. I am not going to
make a fool of myself again. You . . . you are not prepared to marry me
just now, perhaps . . . not just yet?--is that it? . . . You have been
angry with me. . . . I am not surprised at that . . . you never got my
letter . . . you thought that I had forgotten you . . . and you want to
get more used to me now that I am back . . . before we are properly
tokened. . . . Is that it, Elsa? . . . I'll have to wait, eh?--till the
spring, perhaps . . . till we have known one another better again . . .
then . . . perhaps . . ."

He was speaking jerkily, and always with that burning anxiety lurking in
the tone of his voice. But now he suddenly cried out like a poor
creature in pain, vehemently, appealingly, longing for one word of
comfort, one brief respite from this intolerable misery.

"But you don't speak, Elsa! . . . you don't speak. . . . My God, why
don't you speak?"

And she replied slowly, monotonously, for now she seemed to have lost
even the power of suffering pain. It was all so hopeless, so dreary, so
desolate.

"I can never marry you, Andor."

He stared at her almost like one demented, or as if he thought that she,
perhaps, had lost her reason.

"I can never marry you," she repeated firmly, "for I am tokened to Eros
Bela. My farewell banquet is to-day; to-morrow is my wedding day; the
day after I go to my new home. I can never marry you, Andor. It is too
late."

She watched him while she spoke, vaguely wondering within her poor,
broken heart when that