n, he walked quietly out of the house, and
Elsa was alone with yet another bitter-sweet memory to add to her store
of regrets.

CHAPTER XIV

"It is true."

By the time that Andor turned the corner of the house into the street,
he found that the news of his arrival had already spread through the
village like wildfire. Klara Goldstein's ready tongue had been at work
this past hour; she had quickly disseminated the news that the wanderer
had come home. She did not say that the malice and love of mischief in
her had caused her to say nothing to Andor about Elsa's coming wedding.
She merely told the first neighbour whom she came across that Lakatos
Andor had come back, just as she, for one, had always declared that he
would.

Andor's friends had assembled in the street in a trice; here was too
glorious an opportunity to shout and to sing and to make merry, to be
lightly missed. And Andor had always been popular before. He was doubly
so now that he had come back from America or wherever he may have been,
and had made a fortune there; he shook one hundred and fifty hands
before he could walk as far as the presbytery. The gypsies who had just
arrived by train from Arad were not allowed to proceed straight to the
schoolroom. They were made to pause in the great open place before the
church, made to unpack their instruments then and there, and to strike
up the Rakoczy March without more ado, in honour of the finest son of
Marosfalva, who had been thought dead by some, and had returned safe and
sound to his native corner of the earth.

It was with much difficulty that at last Andor succeeded in effecting
his escape and running away from the series of ovations which greeted
him when and wherever he was recognized. The women embraced him without
further ado, the men worried him to tell them some of his adventures
then and there. Above all, everyone wanted to hear how very much more
wretched, uncomfortable and God-forsaken the rest of the wide, wide
world was in comparison with Hungary in general and the village of
Marosfalva in particular.

The heartfelt, if noisy, greetings of his old friends had the effect of
soothing Andor's aching heart. The sight of his native village, the
scent of the air, the dust of the road acted as a slight compensation
for the heavy load of sorrow which otherwise would hopelessly have
weighed him down.

With a final wave of his hat he disappeared from the enraptured gaze of
his friends i