"My dear, I am afraid your skein of silk will break asunder on my arms if you go on with such stories. Don't speak to me of the calamities of the Hétfalusy family. I am not at all interested in the happiness of these people, and if they are wretched I don't want to hear anything about it. They seem to have always been bent upon tempting Fate, so that it is not surprising if Fate at last has turned upon them. But I don't want to know anything about it. I am not good enough to grieve with them in their misfortunes, and I am not bad enough to rejoice in their misery. Leave the subject alone, my dear Cornelia." Cornelia put down the little ball of silk, relieved her husband's arms of the skein, and then sitting beside him on a little stool, kept on stroking him with her tiny hands until she had quite smoothed out all the angry wrinkles on his face, and he had brightened up again and declared, like a good little boy, that he was not a bit put out and would listen to the story again. "Poor Leonora! her married life was very unhappy." "But she got what she wanted." "It seems to me that you know more of my story than I do myself." "I only know the happy part of it. Was not her husband her youthful ideal?" "You amaze me. Whenever we used to meet subsequently, she was always full of lamentations, and described herself as very unhappy. To my mind she only took Széphalmi out of bravado, because you deserted her." "My dear, after that I must whisper in your ear something which only one other soul in the world but myself knows anything about. I am sure _you_ will not say anything about it, because you are good, and that other person will be silent because she is afraid to speak. That pale lady who was so fond of thinking of death, who went to a ball in a myrtle wreath and a white dress with a black fringe, used to have assignations in the dilapidated hut of an old village granny with a youth who was no other than Széphalmi, her present husband. The affair was kept so secret that nobody knew anything about it. The old hag, why I know not, confided the secret to me on the very day when I arrived at Hétfalu Castle in readiness for the wedding. It was as I have said. My pale moonbeam, when everybody was asleep in the castle, used to put on a peasant girl's garb, wrap her head in a flowered kerchief, and glide all alone, along the garden paths, to the old woman's hut at the end of the village, where the youth, disguised as a shepherd, was waiting for her. Oh! this intimacy was of long standing. I heard them talking to each other. In my first mad paroxysm of rage, I was for rushing out and killing the pair of them on the spot; but gradually I recovered my senses, and I asked myself whether it was not more shameful for me, a soldier, to have pried upon a woman than for that woman to have deceived me. Besides, what was there to be done if she loved another? She ought not, of course, to have promised me her hand--a hand without a heart _must_