It was the shop assistant who had seen to it all. He had gone up to Arad and seen a married sister of his late master's—Sara Rosen, whose husband kept a second-hand clothes shop there, and who gave full instructions to an undertaker whilst declaring herself unable—owing to delicate health—to attend the funeral herself.
The undertaker had provided a cart and a couple of oxen and two men to lift the coffin in and out. They came late on the Thursday evening, at about eight o'clock, and drew up at the back of the late Leopold Hirsch's shop. No one was about and the night was dark.
Slowly the cart, creaking on its wheels and axles, wound its way through some maize stubble, up a soft, sandy road to the enclosed little bit of ground which the local Jews have reserved for themselves.
And the mysterious veil which divides the present from the past fell quickly over this act of the village tragedy, as it had done with pomp and circumstance after the banquet which followed the laying to rest of the murdered man.
CHAPTER XXIX
"Some day."
A week went by after the funeral before Elsa saw Andor again. She had not purposely avoided him, any more than she had avoided everyone else: but unlike most girls of her class and of her nationality she had felt a great desire to be alone during the most acute period of this life's crisis through which she was passing just now.
At first on that never-to-be-forgotten morning when she woke to her wedding-day—her white veil and wreath of artificial white roses lying conspicuously on the top of the chest of drawers, so that her eyes were bound to alight on them the moment they opened—and saw her mother standing beside her bed, dishevelled, pale, and obviously labouring under some terrible excitement, she had been conscious as of an awful blow on the head, a physical sensation of numbness and of pain.