ore him
off on this improvised bier. This time the gardener lent his aid.

[1] A Hungarian office.

[2] Hungarian name for beadle.

CHAPTER IV.

When the men, accompanied by several children who were playing in the
village street and had inquisitively joined the passing procession,
appeared at the Molnars' hut with their horrible burden, the beautiful
Panna was standing in the kitchen, churning. At the sight of the
lifeless form lying on the bier, she uttered a piercing shriek and
dropped the stick from her hands, which fell by her side as though
paralyzed. It was at least a minute before her body was again subject
to her will and she could rush to the corpse and throw herself prone
upon it.

Meanwhile the men had had time to carry the dead form into the room
adjoining the kitchen and set the bier upon the clay floor, after which
they took to their heels as if pursued by fiends; at least Janos and
the beadle did so; the gardener had remained to try to comfort the poor
woman, so suddenly widowed, in the first tempest of her despair.

Panna lay on her husband's dead body, wringing her hands and moaning:
"Oh, God! oh, God!" sobbing until even the gardener, a stolid,
weather-beaten peasant, and anything but soft-hearted, could not
restrain his own tears. Not until after several minutes had passed did
the young wife raise herself to her knees, and ask in a voice choked
with tears, what all this meant, what had happened.

"The master shot your Pista," replied the gardener in a tone so low
that it was scarcely audible.

"The master? Pista? Shot?" repeated Panna mechanically, absently, as
if the words which she slowly uttered belonged to an unknown,
incomprehensible language. She stared at the gardener with dilated
eyes, and her lips moved without emitting any sound. At last, however,
understanding of the present returned, and the words escaped with
difficulty from her labouring breast: "Oh, God, oh, God, how could it
happen? How could God permit such misery?" Again she was silent,
while the gardener looked away and seemed to be examining the opposite
house with the utmost attention through the panes of the little window.

But Panna was beginning to think more clearly and to recover from the
dull stupor into which the sudden shock had thrown her. Still kneeling
beside the corpse, wringing her hands, and amid floods of tears, she
began again:

"The master shot my poor Pista from carelessness?"