Year by year Thomas became more taciturn and if Anne asked him whether anything hurt him or if he had any worries, he shook his head impatiently. No, there was nothing the matter with him; that was just his Hungarian nature.
But when he took his son on his knee he told him tales of big forests, an ancestral country house, an old garden. Fields, horses, harvests in the glaring sun ... and his face became rejuvenated and he held his head as of old, in the little glen, when he turned towards the sun.
Anne had become accustomed not to be told these things by her husband. Nor did she mention Ille when letters in a female hand came thence and one handwriting, with its shapeless, rustic characters, repeated itself frequently. When once it happened that Otto Füger brought the mail up, Anne found one of these letters on the piano. She took it into her hand and the contact made her tremble. She had to struggle against herself; was it pride, honesty, or cowardice? She put the envelope untouched on Thomas’s table. She did not question him, she did not complain, but she never spoke of Ille again.
From that time the name of this strange land became a ghost in the house. They never pronounced it, but it was ever there between them.
It seemed to Anne that even now it was stealing, hostile, through the silence, drawing Thomas away from her. Desperate fear possessed her; she felt that she was going to be left alone in icy darkness with no way out of it.
“Thomas,” she said imploringly, as if calling for help, “why can’t we talk to each other?”
Illey raised his head from between his hands.
“Are you reproaching me with my nature again?”
Anne perceived impatient irritation in her husband’s voice.