“They seem to have stopped shooting,” said my mother, after a while, in that wonderful quiet way which was always reflected on her countenance whenever life treated her harshly. “It will be over sometime; we’ve got to live through it somehow,” I said, just to say something. My mother moved wearily. “Be careful you do not catch cold. The night is cool ...” Suddenly there was a sound of voices on the road. I remembered something I had been told. Burglars.... “We ought to hide our money, mother, at any rate. If it were taken we could get no more under the present circumstances.” For a moment, a moment only, my mother looked at me with consternation. Then: “Of course.” And her mind too had crossed the abyss that separated the old world of safety and protection from the new world of insecurity, lawlessness, and uncertainty. I slipped the money under the carpet in the dark hall. Twice I stopped. Someone was speaking in the road, near the gate. Voices were audible, long consultations.... Steps withdrew. I went carefully up stairs and took care that nobody should observe that the house was awake. My room seemed to have become chilled while I was downstairs. The blackness engulfed me as in some deep black sea, and I shivered. For a long time I remained standing in the same place. An incessant sound of death came to me from outside: the chestnut tree under the window was shedding its leaves. Resignation. The time of many falling leaves. The eve of November.... The air was filled with low, rustling, soughing, ghostly sounds. It was as if a crowd walked stealthily in the garden and the forest stole secretly away. Hopeless distress, as I had never felt it before, came over me. Autumn is departing from the hills this night, and by the morrow it will be gone. Then winter comes irresistibly, dragging at its heels snow, cold, frost, suffering, the unknown and perhaps the impossible. What is in store for us? In the darkness, like the ticking of time, incessantly, the leaves fell with a faint sound. A dog whined beyond the garden, whined in an eerie, terrifying way, as if somebody had died in its master’s house.... Despair overcame me. It was not only a dog that whined its lament: it was the night that wept over Hungary. CHAPTER II _November 1st._ In the morning I heard that Tisza had been murdered. The telephone rang in the corridor, sharply, aggressively, as if the town was shouting out to us among the woods. It was with reluctance that I put the receiver to my ear.