A Bride of the Plains

by Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy

"I don't know," she murmured.

"If you don't know, who should?" he remarked, with affected indifference. "Well! I shall have to make myself heard at the back door—that's all!"

"How?"

"Wouldn't you hear me if I knocked?"

"Not if I were in the tap-room and a lot of customers to attend to."

"Well, then, I should hammer away until you did hear me."

"For that old gossip Rézi to hear you," she protested. "Her cottage is not fifty paces away from our back door."

"Then it will have to be the front door, after all," he rejoined philosophically.

"No, no!—the neighbours—and perhaps the tap-room full of people."

"But d——n it, Klara," he exclaimed impatiently, "I have made up my mind to come and spend my last evening with you—and when I have made up my mind to a thing, I am not likely to change it because of a lot of gossiping peasants, because of old Rézi, or the whole lot of them. So if you don't want me to come in by the front door, which is open, or to knock at the back door, which is locked, how am I going to get in?"