ging thatch
were all discoloured and broken, and the hemp which hung in bundles
beside them looked uneven and dark in colour, obviously beaten with a
slipshod, careless hand.

Such a contrast to the house of Hoher Aladar--the rich justice of the
peace and of Ilona his wife! Elsa knew and expected that the usual
homily on the subject would not fail to be forthcoming as it did on
every Sunday afternoon; she only wondered what particular form it would
take to-day, whether Bela would sneer at her and her mother for the
tumble-down look of the verandah, for the bad state of the hemp, or the
coating of dirt upon the earthenware pots.

But it was the hemp to-day.

"Why don't you look after it, Elsa?" said Bela roughly, as he pointed to
the tangled mass of stuff above him, "your mother ruins even the sparse
crop which she has."

"I can't do everything," said Elsa, in that same gentle, even voice
which held in its tones all the gamut of hopeless discouragement; "since
father has been stricken he wants constant attention. Mother won't give
it him, so I have to be at his beck and call. Then there is the washing
. . ."

"I know, I know," broke in Bela with a sneer, "you need not always
remind me that my future wife--the bride of my lord the Count's own
bailiff--does menial work for a village schoolmistress and a snuffy old
priest!"

Elsa made no reply. She pushed open the door of the cottage and went in;
Bela followed her, muttering between his teeth.

The interior of Kapus Benko's home was as squalid, as forlorn looking as
its approach; everywhere the hand of the thriftless housewife was
painfully apparent, in the blackened crockery upon the hearth, in the
dull, grimy look of the furniture--once so highly polished--in the
tattered table-cloth, the stains upon the floor and the walls, but above
all was it apparent in the dower-chest--that inalienable pride of every
thrifty Hungarian housewife--the dower-chest, which in Ilona's cottage
was such a marvel of polish outside, and so glittering in its rich
contents of exquisite linen. But here it bore relentless if mute
testimony to the shiftless, untidy, disorderly ways of the Kapus
household. For instead of the neat piles of snow-white linen it was
filled with rubbish--with husks of maize and mouldy cabbage-stalks,
thrown in higgledy-piggledy with bundles of clothes and rags of every
sort and kind.

It stood close to the stove, the smoke of which had long ago covered the
wo