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Updated: June 3, 2025
The old woman mumbled, and shot a malignant look at him. Rozsi drew back her hand, and crossed herself. 'Folly! Swithin thought again; and seizing the girls' arms, he hurried them away. "What did the old hag say?" he asked. Rozsi shook her head. "You don't mean that you believe?" Her eyes were full of tears. "The gipsies are wise," she murmured. "Come, what did she tell you?"
Regaining the hotel, he went to bed again, and dreamed that in some wild country he was living in a room full of insects, where a housemaid Rozsi holding a broom, looked at him with mournful eyes. There seemed an unexplained need for immediate departure; he begged her to forward his things; and shake them out carefully before she put them into the trunk.
Rozsi came running down, looked out at the door, and put her hands up to her breast as if disappointed; suddenly with a quick glance round she saw him. Swithin caught her arm. She slipped away, and her face seemed to bubble with defiance or laughter; she ran up three steps, stopped, looked at him across her shoulder, and fled on up the stairs. Swithin went out bewildered and annoyed.
Three weeks later he was still in Salzburg, no longer at the Goldene Alp, but in rooms over a shop near the Boleskeys'. He had spent a small fortune in the purchase of flowers. Margit would croon over them, but Rozsi, with a sober "Many tanks!" as if they were her right, would look long at herself in the glass, and pin one into her hair.
"You shouldn't have done that," he said; "you shouldn't have run away from me, you know." Rozsi laughed. Swithin withdrew his arm; a desire to shake her seized him. He walked some way before he said, "Will you have the goodness to tell me what you came to that seat for?" Rozsi flashed a look at him. "To-morrow is the fete," she answered. Swithin muttered, "Is that all?"
He was always thinking of Rozsi, he could not read the riddle in her face she held him in a vice, notwithstanding that everything about her threatened the very fetishes of his existence. And Boleskey! Whenever he looked at him he thought, 'If he were only clean? and mechanically fingered his own well-tied cravatte.
One evening when he was walking with a friend in Piccadilly, a girl coming from a side-street accosted him in German. Swithin, after staring at her in silence for some seconds, handed her a five-pound note, to the great amazement of his friend; nor could he himself have explained the meaning of this freak of generosity. Of Rozsi he never heard again....
Margit rose and, bending over him like a mother, murmured: "He is tired it is the ride!" She raised him in her strong arms, and leaning on her shoulder Boleskey staggered from the room. Swithin and Rozsi were left alone. He slid his hand towards her hand that lay so close, on the rough table-cloth. It seemed to await his touch.
He found the quick intelligence of her eyes confusing; sometimes they seemed to look beyond him at something invisible this, too, confused him. From Margit he learned that they had been two years in England, where their father had made his living by teaching languages; they had now been a year in Salzburg. "We wait," suddenly said. Rozsi; and Margit, with a solemn face, repeated, "We wait."
He spoke with suavity, and hissed his s's. A long, vibrating twang quavered through the room. Swithin turned and saw Rozsi sitting at the czymbal; the notes rang under the little hammers in her hands, incessant, metallic, rising and falling with that strange melody.
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