"My lady!" cried Akosh.
"Yes, a dishonourable woman! Your mistress before she was your wife; a——"
The cup was full. Akosh, in a frenzy of passion, rushed forward to attack his step-mother, but the sheriff caught his arm as it descended.
"How dare you?" screamed the young man; "how dare you say so! you, the accomplice of robbers and thieves! You, who are indeed the disgrace of our house! Why woman, if I were to speak, I could send you to gaol, to your fellows!"
His words were so many thunders in Lady Rety's ear. She stood deadly pale, trembling, with downcast eyes—a picture of guilt and misery. There is no saying what the sheriff might not have done but for Vandory's entrance, which put a stop to all further explanations. When the curate entered, Lady Rety seized her husband's hand and led him out of the room. Akosh, still exhausted with his illness, and fearfully excited, flung himself on the sofa, and wept.
A short time afterwards the sheriff's servant brought a note, in which Rety asked his son to leave the house at his earliest convenience. The curate offered to effect a compromise, but Akosh insisted on going immediately. He took a hurried leave of Etelka, and accompanied Vandory, who had offered him shelter under his own roof.
CHAP. XI.
The majority of mankind are more or less eloquent on the subject of the wounds which love inflicts on the human heart, while they most unjustly forget that if love makes wounds, he also heals them, and that his sorrows and pains are as nothing in comparison to the joys he gives us, by rendering us (for the time) insensible to the other griefs that flesh is heir to. This healing and protecting power of love relieved young Rety from the sorrows that would otherwise have beset his mind, and caused him to triumph over griefs which might have borne down a stouter heart than his.
Vandory introduced his young guest to his house; and this done, he hastened to Tengelyi. The notary was just returned from a journey to some distant place, where he had been consulting a legal friend of his. He was preparing to set out again for Kishlak, to talk to Viola, when he was informed of the prisoner's escape. This news deprived him of all hopes of profiting from Viola's confession; and the disappointment was the more painful from the fact of its strengthening his suspicions of the Rety family. Vandory's conversation did much to calm his mind, and the two friends had a long debate on the situation of affairs, and the danger which threatened Vilma's reputation, in the course of which the curate put great stress on the fact that young Rety's love to Vilma was the cause of his banishment from his father's house. Tengelyi was at length induced to promise that he would not oppose his daughter's attachment to Akosh; and when Vandory hastened away, and returned accompanied by the trembling lover, the notary gave him a kind and even hearty welcome, and, by way of a practical demonstration of the old proverb, "the least said, the soonest mended," he led young Rety to his daughter. Having thus far yielded to the influence of his wise and judicious friend, he returned to Vandory, saying, as if to excuse his own weakness,