e clasped tightly together, and with her full, many-hued
petticoats round her slim waist and tiny red-shod feet she looks like a
flower.

The crowd below moves alongside of the train--for the first minute or so
they all keep up with it, close to the carriage at the door of which can
still be seen the head of son or brother or sweetheart. But now the
engine puts on more speed, the wheels revolve more quickly--some of the
crowd fall away, unable to run so fast.

Only the mothers try to keep up--the old women, some of them
bare-footed, stolid, looking straight before them--hardly looking at the
train, just running . . . alongside the train first of all, then they
must needs fall back--but still they run along the metals, even though
the train moves away so quickly now that soon even a mother could not
distinguish her son's head, like a black pin-point leaning out of the
carriage window.

So they run:--one or two women run thus for over a kilometre, they run
long after the train has disappeared from view.

But Elsa stood quite still. She did not try to run after the train.

Through the noise of the puffing engine, the final cries of farewell,
through all the noise and the bustle, Andor's cry rose above all, his
final appeal to her to be true:

"Elsa! you will wait for me?"

CHAPTER IV

"Now that he is dead."

Stranger, if you should ever be driving on the main road between Szeged
and Arad, tell your driver to pull up at the village of Marosfalva; its
one broad street runs inland at right angles from the road; you will
then have on your right two or three bits of meadowland overshadowed by
willow trees, which slope down to the Maros; beyond the Maros lies the
great plain--the fields of maize and pumpkin, of hemp and sunflower. And
who knows what lies beyond the fields?

But on your left will be the village of Marosfalva with the wayside inn
and public bar, kept by Ignacz Goldstein, standing prominently at the
corner immediately facing you. Two pollarded acacias are planted near
the door of the inn, above the lintel of which a painted board scribbled
over with irregular lettering invites the traveller to enter. A wooden
verandah, with tumble-down roof and worm-eaten supporting beams, runs
along two sides of the house, and from the roof hang a number of
gaily-coloured and decorated earthenware pots and jars.

The open space in front of the inn and the whole of the length of the
one street of Marosfalva ar