"Oh, my lady, the various counties have done that scores of times, and
now and then a young fellow braver than the rest has tried to catch him;
but they have all of them ended by losing their own heads instead of
getting his."

"Never mind, I will not be satisfied till that man is in my power. Ah,
the robber-chieftain little imagines what an enemy he has raised up
against him in me, when he put this terrible riddle into my heart. And
it is a riddle I mean to solve, too."

The priest shook his head as if he would have said: "Strong men have
given up the task, what can a weak woman do?"

Henrietta told her husband not a word of all this, and the chatter about
the black jewelry gradually died a natural death. Hatszegi sent back her
property to the widow and told her where she could find the vendor--in
Paris. We can readily imagine that she did not go all the way to Paris
to make enquiries, being quite content with getting back her stolen
property.

This incident made such an impression on Henrietta that she avoided all
those circles in which she had been so ruthlessly exposed to insult. A
blush of shame and anger suffused her face whenever she thought of it.
She also abandoned all her work of benevolence among the people. She
began to think that her husband was right after all when he said, as he
did continually: "Let the gentry stick to the gentry, and the poor to
the poor!" In fact she was now inclined to think him right in
everything; the easiest thing a wife can do, she said to herself, is to
trust her husband implicitly. Henceforth Henrietta adopted another mode
of life; her motto now was: "Whatever my husband chooses, for at home he
is my lord!"

So the halls of Hidvar overflowed with guests again, and balls,
_soirees_, and picnics followed each other in quick succession. The
young wife learnt to know the gentry and magnates of Transylvania face
to face, and it was no wonder if she quickly accommodated herself to her
new surroundings and began to be reconciled to her fate. She felt like
one who, after seeing a landscape by moonlight and thinking it highly
crude, sees it again by the light of day and finds it quite different.

And now the autumn came, the season when men prepare and congregate
together for dangerous hunting expeditions. Bears and boars are now the
only topics. For a week beforehand the women cannot get a word out of
the gentlemen, they herd together in the armoury and talk of nothing but
guns