CHAPTER VII
"They are Jews and we are Hungarians."
But what of Elsa during this time? What of the sorrow, the alternating hope and despair of those weary, weary months? She did not say much, she hardly ever cried, but even her mother—hard and unemotional as she was—respected the girl's secret for awhile, after the news was brought into the cottage that Andor was really dead.
Erös Béla had brought the news, and Elsa, on hearing it thus blurted out in Béla's rough, cruel fashion, had turned deathly pale, ere she contrived to run out of the room and hide herself away in a corner, where she had cried till she had made herself sick and faint.
"Have you been blind all these years, Irma néni?" Erös Béla had said with his habitual sneer, when Irma threw up her bony hands in hopeless puzzlement at her daughter's behaviour. "Did you not know that Elsa has been in love with Andor all along?"
"No," said Irma in her quiet, matter-of-fact tone, "I did not know it. Did you?"
"Of course I did," he replied dryly; "but I have also known for the past six months that Andor was dead."
"You knew it?" exclaimed Irma with obvious incredulity.
"I have told you so, haven't I?" he retorted, "and I am not in the habit of lying."
"But how did you come to know it?"