game. Like most of his race, his
habits were strictly sober. As he kept a cool head, he usually won; and
his winnings at tarok made a substantial addition to the income which he
made by selling spirits and tobacco. Leopold Hirsch, who kept the
village grocery store, was also an inveterate player, and, like
Goldstein, a very steady winner. But it was not the chance of a
successful gamble which brought him so often to the tap-room. For years
now he had dangled round Klara's fashionable skirts, and it seemed as if
at last his constancy was to be rewarded. While she was younger--and was
still of surpassing beauty--she had had wilder flights of ambition than
those which would lead her to rule over a village grocery store: during
those times she had allowed Leopold Hirsch to court her, without giving
him more than very cursory encouragement.

As the years went on, however, and her various admirers from Arad proved
undesirous to go to the length of matrimony, she felt more kindly
disposed toward Leo, who periodically offered her his heart and hand,
and the joint ownership of the village grocery store. She had looked
into her little piece of mirror rather more closely of late than she had
done hitherto, and had discovered two or three ominous lines round her
fine, almond-shaped eyes, and noted that her nose showed of late a more
marked tendency to make close acquaintance with her chin.

Then she began to ponder, and to give the future more serious
consideration than she had ever done before. She ticked off on her long,
pointed fingers the last bevy of her admirers on whom she might
reasonably count: the son of the chemist over in Arad, the tenant of the
Kender Road farm, the proprietor of the station cabs, and there were two
or three others; but they were certainly falling away, and she had added
no new ones to her list these past six months.

Eros Bela's formally declared engagement to Kapus Elsa had been a very
severe blow. She had really reckoned on Bela. He was educated and
unconventional, and though he professed the usual anti-Semitic views
peculiar to his kind, Klara did not believe that these were very
genuine. At any rate, she had reckoned that her fine eyes and
provocative ways would tilt successfully against the man's racial
prejudices.

Eros Bela was rich and certainly, up to a point, in love with her. Klara
was congratulating herself on the way she was playing her matrimonial
cards, when all her hopes were so s