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The countess possessed sufficient self-control to conceal her delight. "By the bye," said Kengyelesy, turning to Henrietta, "how does your ladyship like the Kengyelesy puszta?" "Very well." "And the castle?" "That is nice too."
Kengyelesy also courteously accepted the invitation and then taking Henrietta's little hand between his own palms so that he could just manage to kiss the tips of her fingers, he said to her in a strange and piteous sort of voice: "But then you must promise to love our friend Leonard here a little better than you have done hitherto." A shudder ran through Henrietta's body at these words.
He really fancied that he had fallen among a lot of lunatics, till at last Count Kengyelesy forced his way through the crowd towards him, put both his hands on his hips and began to quiz him: "Well, you are a pretty fellow! you are a pretty squire of dames, I must say!" "But what's the matter? What has happened? Why do you laugh?" "Listen to him!" cried the count, turning to the bystanders.
"Why, old fellow!" said Count Kengyelesy to him one day, after he had been indulging in an unusually fiery philippic at Quarter Sessions, "why, old fellow, what sort of venom have you swallowed that makes you perorate so savagely against this worthy Fatia Negra.
There was no need to offer the Countess Kengyelesy such an opportunity twice, the very next day the round of visiting began. All the notabilities of the higher circles got themselves introduced to her ladyship by mutual friends, and the lesser fry, whom nobody knew, were introduced to her by the count himself.
The deputy Lord-lieutenant of the county knew them both and at his house they learnt to know each other. And Count Kengyelesy was one of those men whom it is impossible to avoid when once you have made his acquaintance. It was not very long, therefore, before he took his new friend, absolutely under his protection and hauled him off to his wife.
But a still greater surprise awaited him. He had a shrewd suspicion that the Countess Kengyelesy did not require the bill he had signed to discharge any debt to usurers; but not even in his dreams would it ever have occurred to him that Madame Kengyelesy, at the very moment when he had gone out into the street, had sat down on the very same chair from which the baron had arisen, taken into her hand the very same pen in which the ink he had used was not yet dry, and selecting a sheet of letter paper, written a few lines of her long pointed pot-hooks to her friend, the Baroness Hátszegi: informing her in a most friendly manner that she had succeeded in persuading Hátszegi to exchange the bill that Koloman was suspected of forging for one of his own in order to give his wife the opportunity of acknowledging the signature as her own and putting a stop to all further legal proceedings.
Despite his misgivings, Count Kengyelesy succeeded in reaching his home at Arad without being robbed by Fatia Negra.
On the contrary, my adventure with the baroness is somewhat tragical, and I'll trouble you to expend no more of your feeble witticisms on me." Kengyelesy shrugged his shoulders. "I did not know you would take it so seriously, but so it is." "From whom did you hear all this, from the baroness?" "No from Hátszegi." An idea suddenly flashed through Gerzson's brain.
"Did not your ladyship then understand the allusion the count made just now when he asked you to love your husband a little more than hitherto?" "What has such nonsense to do with me?" "He meant by that that he who is unlucky in love is lucky at play; for last night my lord baron played cards with my lord count and won from him the whole Kengyelesy estate straight off."
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