comforts they wanted just by doing what they wished. . . . I had to
think of father and mother, Andor. . . . What could I do?"

"That is so, Elsa," he assented, speaking very slowly and deliberately.
. . . "That is so, of course . . . I understand . . . I ought to have
known . . . to have guessed something of the kind at any rate. . . . My
God!" he added, with renewed vehemence, "but I do seem to have been an
accursed fool!--thinking that everything would go on just the same while
I was weaving my dreams out there on the other side of the globe. . . .
I ought to have guessed, I suppose, that they wouldn't leave you alone
. . . you the prettiest girl in the county. . . ."

"I held out as long as I could. . . . But I felt that if you were dead
nothing really mattered."

"My poor little dove," he whispered gently.

Gradually he felt a great calmness descending over him. It was her
helplessness that appealed to him, the pathos of her quiet resignation:
he felt how mean and unmanly it would be to give way to that rebellious
rage which was burning in his veins. Three years under the orders of
ofttimes brutal petty officers had taught him a measure of
self-restraint; the two further years of hard, unceasing toil under
foreign climes, the patient amassing of florin upon florin to enable him
to come back and claim the girl whom he loved, had completed the work of
changing an irresponsible, untrammelled child of these Hungarian plains
into a strong, well-balanced, well-controlled man of a wider world. His
first instinct, when the terrible blow had been struck to all his hopes
and all his happiness, had been the wild, unreasoning desire to strike
back, and to kill. Had he been left to himself just then and then found
himself face to face with the man who had robbed him of Elsa, the
semi-civilization of the past five years would have fallen away from
him, he would once more have relapsed into the primeval, unfettered
state of his earlier manhood. The crude passions of these sons of the
soil are only feebly held in check by the laws of their land: at times
they break through their fetters, and then they are a law unto
themselves.

But Andor loved Elsa with a gentler and purer love than usually dwells
in the heart of a man of his stamp. He had proved this during the past
five years spent in daily, hourly thoughts of her. Now that he found her
in trouble, he would not add to her burden by parading his own before
her.

Manlike,