"No!" she said decisively. "Better make your peace with Elsa. I'll have none of her leavings. I've had all I wanted out of you to-day—the banquet first and now your coming here. . . . It'll be all over the village presently—and that's all I care about. Have a drink now," she added good-humouredly, "and then go and make your peace with Elsa . . . if you can."
She turned abruptly away from him, leaving him to murmur curses under his breath, and went on attending to her customers; nor did he get for the moment another opportunity of speaking with her, for Leopold Hirsch hovered round her for some considerable time after that, and presently, with much noise and pomp and circumstance, no less a personage than the noble young Count himself graced the premises of Ignácz Goldstein the Jew with his august presence.
CHAPTER XIX
"Now go and fetch the key."
He belonged to the ancient family of Rákosy, who had owned property on both banks of the Maros for the past eight centuries, and Feri Rákosy, the twentieth-century representative of his mediæval forbears, was a good-looking young fellow of the type so often met with among the upper classes in Hungary: quite something English in appearance—well set-up, well-dressed, well-groomed from the top of his smooth brown hair to the tips of his immaculately-shod feet—in the eyes an expression of habitual boredom, further accentuated by the slight, affected stoop of the shoulders and a few premature lines round the nose and mouth; and about his whole personality that air of high-breeding and of good, pure blood which is one of the chief characteristics of the true Hungarian aristocracy.
He did little more than acknowledge the respectful salutations which greeted him from every corner of the little room as he entered, but he nodded to Erös Béla and smiled all over his good-looking face at Klara, who, in her turn, welcomed him with a profusion of smiles which brought a volley of muttered curses to Leopold Hirsch's lips.
While he held her one hand rather longer than was necessary she, with the other, took his hat from him, and then, laughing coquettishly, she pointed to a parcel which was causing the pocket of his well-cut Norfolk jacket to bulge immoderately.