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At that moment Lorand appeared beside her. At the first cry he had rushed from his room and, unarmed, hastened to Czipra's aid. The girl was still struggling with the robber, holding him back, by sheer force, from entering the door. Lorand sprang towards her, and dealt the intruder such a blow with his fist in the face, that two of his teeth were broken.
Lorand had glorious chestnut-brown curls, smooth as silk. Madame Bálnokházy had once fallen madly in love with those locks and Czipra was wont to arrange them every morning with her own hands: it was one of her privileges, and she understood it so well. Lorand was philosopher enough to allow others to do him a service, and permitted Czipra's fine fingers the privilege of playing among his locks.
"Give me the scissors: I will soon show you," said Lorand, and, taking them from Czipra's hand, he gathered together the locks upon his forehead with one hand and with the other cropped them quite short, throwing what he had cut to the ground. "So with the rest." Czipra drew back in horror at this ruthless deed, feeling as pained as if those scissors had been thrust into her own body.
He brought also a letter from the young lady for Lorand. "From the young lady?" Lorand took the letter from him and told him to take the cloak up to the guest's room. He himself hastened to his own room. As he passed through the saloon, Gyáli met him, coming from Czipra's room. The dandy's face was peculiarly flurried.
Czipra suddenly mixed the cards together: "Let us try once more. Cut three times in succession. That is right." She placed the cards out again in packs. Lorand noticed that as the cards came side by side, Czipra's face suddenly flushed; her eyes began to blaze with unwonted fire. "See, the queen of melancholy is just beside you, on the far side the murderer.
The silence of deep sleep reigned in the house. When everyone was in his place, Kandur crept on his stomach among the bushes, which formed a grove under Czipra's window that looked on to the garden, and putting an acacia leaf into his mouth, began to imitate the song of the nightingale.
There was much bitterness in these words; but the orphan of the ruined gentleman said them with such calm, such peace of mind, that every string of Czipra's heart was relaxed as when a damp mist affects the strings of a harp. Meanwhile they had brought Melanie's travelling-trunk: there was only one, and no bonnet-boxes almost incredible!
It must be near to her: it was warbling there, perhaps she could grasp it with her hand. But as she bent the bough, a fierce figure sprang up before her and grasped the hand she had stretched out. The dark figure, which seized Czipra's hand so suddenly, stared with a blood-thirsty grin into his victim's face, whose every limb shuddered with terror at her assailant.
But Lorand was just relating to Melanie how the day-before-yesterday, when the beautiful moonlight shone upon the piano, which had remained open as the young lady had left it, soft fairy voices began suddenly to rise from it. Though that was surely no spirit playing on the keys, but Czipra's tame white weasel that, hunting night moths, ran along them. "Yes," said Desiderius in answer to the lady.
"Why, I could not understand that Miss Melanie was able to persuade herself to change this house for that; now I know: she must have put up with a great persecution here." "Persecution?" said Czipra, astonished: the gentlemen too stared at the speaker. "Who would have persecuted her?" "Who? Why these eyes!" said Gyáli, gazing flatteringly into Czipra's eyes.
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