at she should get some rest
to-night."

Ah, well! it was a queer wedding, and no mistake! The queerest that had
ever been in Marosfalva within memory of man. A bride more prone to
tears than to laughter! A bridegroom surly, discontented, and paying
marked attentions to the low-down Jewess over at the inn under his
future wife's very nose!

It was quite one thing for a man to assert his own independence, and to
show his bride at the outset on whose feet the highest-heeled boots
would be, but quite another to flout the customs of the countryside and
all its proprieties.

When, after supper, good and abundant wine had loosened all tongues,
adverse comments on the absent bridegroom flowed pretty freely. This
should have been the merriest time of the evening--the merriest time, in
fact, of all the three festive days--the time when one was allowed to
chaff the bride and to make her blush, to slap the lucky bridegroom on
the back and generally to allow full play to that exuberance of spirits
which is always bubbling up to the surface out of a Magyar peasant's
heart.

No doubt that Bela's conduct had upset Elsa and generally cast a gloom
over the festive evening. But the young people were not on that account
going to be done out of their dancing; the older ones might sit round
and gossip and throw up their hands and sigh, but that was no reason why
the gipsies should play a melancholy dirge.

A csardas it must be, and of the liveliest! And after that another and
yet another. Would it not be an awful pity to waste Eros Bela's money,
even though he was not here to enjoy its fruits? So dancing was kept up
till close on eight o'clock in the morning--till the sun was high up in
the heavens and the bell of the village church tolled for early Mass.
Until then the gipsies scraped their fiddles and banged their czimbalom
almost uninterruptedly; hundreds of sad and gay folk-songs were sung in
chorus in the intervals of dancing the national dance. Cotton petticoats
of many hues fluttered, leather boots--both red and black--clinked and
stamped until the morning.

Then it was that the merry company at last broke up, and that Feher
Karoly and his brother took the short cut behind the inn, and found the
bridegroom--at whose expense they had just danced and feasted--lying
stark and stiff under the clear September sun.

They informed the mayor, who at once put himself in communication with
the gendarmerie of Arad: but long before the p