er
on that account. When she refused young Barna--the mayor's eldest son,
and Nagy Lajos, the rich pig merchant from Somso, people shrugged their
shoulders and said that mayhap Elsa wanted to marry a shopkeeper of Arad
or even a young noble lord. Irma neni said nothing for the first year,
and even for two. She saw Nagy Lajos go away, and young Barna court
another girl. That was perhaps as it should be. Elsa was growing more
beautiful every year--and there was a noble lord who owned a fine estate
and a castle close by, who had taken lately to riding over on Sunday
afternoons to Marosfalva, and paid marked attention to Elsa.

Noble lords had been known to marry peasant girls--at least in books, so
Irma neni had been told, and, of course, one never knows! God's ways
were wonderful sometimes.

But when two years had gone by, when a rich shopkeeper from Arad had
come and courted and been refused, and when the noble lord had suddenly
ceased his Sunday afternoon visits to Marosfalva, Irma became more
anxious. She had a long and serious talk with her daughter, which led to
no good.

To all her mother's wise counsels and sound arguments Elsa had opposed
the simple statement of facts:

"I do not wish to marry, mother dear; not just yet."

This, of course, would never do. Irma realized that she had allowed her
ambition for her daughter to run away with her common-sense. Elsa must
have got some queer notion or other in her head; that intimacy with the
schoolmistress--who came from Budapest and talked a vast amount of
sentimental stuff which she had imbibed out of books--must be stopped at
once, and Elsa be taken in hand by her own mother.

To aim high was quite one thing, but to let every chance, however
splendid, slip through one's fingers was the work of a fool.

The work of taking Elsa in hand was thus promptly undertaken. Fate
favoured the mother's intentions: old Kapus was stricken with paralysis,
and Elsa had, from that hour forth, to spend most of her time with her
father in the house, and immediately under her mother's eye.

Though young Barna was married by now, and the pig merchant, the noble
lord and the rich shopkeeper all gone to seek a sweetheart elsewhere,
there were still plenty of suitors dangling round the beauty of the
country-side: in fact her well-known pride and aloofness had brought a
surfeit of competitors in the lists. Foremost among these was Eros Bela,
who was not only young and in a high positio