"My father . . ." she began.
"Yes!" he said. "Go and tell your father that I, Leopold Hirsch, your affianced husband, am browbeating you—making a scene, what?—because you have made an assignation with my lord the young Count, here—at night—under your father's roof—under the roof of a child of Israel! You! An assignation with a dirty Christian! . . . Bah! Go and tell your father that! And he will thrash you to within an inch of your life! We are Jews, he and I, and hold the honour of our women sacred—more sacred than their life!"
"Don't be a fool, Leopold," she cried, feeling that indeed, between her father and this madman, her life had ceased to be safe. She looked round her helplessly. Three or four besotted fools lying helpless across the tables, and all the village dancing and making merry some two hundred mètres away, her father—implacable, as she well knew, where her conduct was concerned—and this madman ready to kill to satisfy his lust of vengeance and of hate—she felt that indeed, unless Heaven performed a miracle, here was the beginning of an awful, an irredeemable tragedy.
"Leopold, don't be a fool," she reiterated, trying with all her might not to appear frightened or scared or confused. "I have promised Kapus Elsa to go to her dance for half an hour. I had forgotten all about it. I must go now."
"Go and change your dress, then," he retorted with a sneer, "then you can go out by the back way. You have put the key away somewhere, haven't you? You know where it is."
"You are mad about doors to-night. I tell you I am going out now, by that front door—at once."
"And I tell you," he said, slowly and deliberately, "that if you cross the front door step I will call your father and tell him that you go and meet your lover—a Christian lover—the young Count—who would as soon think of marrying you as he would a nigger or a kitchen slut. Before you will have reached the high road your father and I will be on your heels, and either he or I will strangle you ere you come within sight of my lord's castle."
"You are mad!" she cried. "Or else an idiot."
"Better look for that back-door key," he retorted.
"What has the back-door key to do with it?" she asked sullenly.