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Andor's friends had assembled in the street in a trice; here was too glorious an opportunity to shout and to sing and to make merry, to be lightly missed. And Andor had always been popular before. He was doubly so now that he had come back from America or wherever he may have been, and had made a fortune there; he shook one hundred and fifty hands before he could walk as far as the presbytery.

It seems that there were a great many cases of cholera in the isolation hospital at Slovnitza and lists were sent up daily from there to Budapest of new cases, of severe cases, of discharges and of deaths. In one of these lists Andor's name certainly did appear among the dead, and a brief note to that effect had been officially sent to Lakatos. But surely the news should have had confirmation!

But now, since that last csárdás had begun, a strange and mysterious current had gone from Andor's arm right through her heart; something had happened, which caused her cheeks to glow with a fire other than that produced by the heat of the dance and made her own hands tremble when they rested on Andor's shoulder. And there was that in his look which made her eyes burn and fill with tears.

When he encountered Andor's quick, savage glance he gave a loud, harsh laugh. "She gave it you straight enough, didn't she?" he said as he swaggered into the room. "You were listening?" asked Andor curtly. "Yes. I was," replied Béla. "I was in here and I heard your voice, so I stole out on to the verandah. You were not ten paces away; I could hear every word you said." "Well?"

Above all, everyone wanted to hear how very much more wretched, uncomfortable and God-forsaken the rest of the wide, wide world was in comparison with Hungary in general and the village of Marosfalva in particular. The heartfelt, if noisy, greetings of his old friends had the effect of soothing Andor's aching heart.

His nephew Andor's return had certainly cheered him up for a while, but soon after that he seemed to collapse very suddenly in health, like old folk do in this part of the world stricken down by one or other of the several diseases which are engendered by the violent extremes of heat and cold diseases of the liver for the most part the beginning of a slowly-oncoming end.

God would punish if He so desired indeed, He had punished already, for never had such sorrow descended in Andor's heart before, of that she felt quite sure. He became quite calm after awhile. Even his passion seemed to have died down under the weight of this immense sorrow.

When they wake they'll go away all right." Just then the outer door was opened and Lakatos Andor's broad figure appeared upon the threshold. Leopold Hirsch gave him a nod, and without another look on Klara, he strode out into the night. "Jealous, like a madman."

But already she had recovered herself a little, and Lakatos Andor's somewhat dictatorial tone grated upon her sensitive ear. "There's nothing the matter with me," she retorted, with a return of her habitual flippancy. "What should be the matter?"

Left alone with the children, Thea sat down on Tanya's little chair she would rather have sat on the floor, but was afraid of rumpling her dress and helped them play "cars" with Andor's iron railway set. She showed him new ways to lay his tracks and how to make switches, set up his Noah's ark village for stations and packed the animals in the open coal cars to send them to the stockyards.