uddenly dashed to the ground.

Bela was going to marry that silly, ignorant peasant girl, and she,
Klara, would be left to marry Leopold after all.

Her anger and humiliation had been very great, and she had battled very
persistently and very ably to regain the prize which she had lost. She
knew quite well that, but for the fact that she belonged to the alien
and despised race, Eros Bela would have been only too happy to marry
her. His vanity alone had made him choose Kapus Elsa. He wanted the
noted beauty for himself, because the noted beauty had been courted by
so many people, and where so many people had failed he was proud to
succeed.

Nor would he have cared to have it said that he had married a Jewess.
There is always a certain thought of disgrace attached to such a
marriage, whether it has been contracted by peer or peasant, and Eros
Bela's one dominating idea in life was to keep the respect and deference
of his native village.

But he had continued his attentions to Klara, and Klara had kept a
wonderful hold over his imagination and over his will. She was the one
woman who had ever had her will with him--only partially, of course, and
not to the extent of forcing him into matrimony--but sufficiently to
keep him also dangling round her skirts even though his whole allegiance
should have belonged to Elsa.

The banquet this afternoon had been a veritable triumph. Whatever she
had suffered through Bela's final disloyalty to herself, she knew that
Kapus Elsa must have suffered all through the banquet. The humiliation
of seeing one's bridegroom openly flaunting his admiration for another
woman must have been indeed very bitter to bear.

Not for a moment did Klara Goldstein doubt that the subsequent scene was
an act of vengeance against herself on Elsa's part. She judged other
women by her own standard, discounted other women's emotions, thoughts,
feelings, by her own. She thought it quite natural that Elsa should wish
to be revenged, just as she was quite sure that Bela was already
meditating some kind of retaliation for the shame which Andor had put
upon him and for Elsa's obstinacy and share in the matter.

She had not spoken to anyone of the little scene which had occurred
between the four walls of the little schoolroom: on the contrary she had
spoken loudly of both the bridegroom's and the bride's cordiality to her
during the banquet.

"Elsa wanted me to go to the dancing this evening," she said casually,