"Tell him it is all very well and we will see."
"Nothing else?"
"Nothing else."
The priest departed with an unctuous farewell, and left Panna alone. She remained motionless in the same position, with bent head, her hands resting nervelessly in her lap, her eyes staring into vacancy. So her father found her when, half an hour after, he returned from the parish tavern. When she saw him, she started from her stupor, rushed to him, and exclaimed amid a violent flood of tears:
"Father, it was all in vain, there is no justice on earth."
In reply to the astonished old man's anxious questions, she told him, for the first time, the story she had hitherto kept secret of her petition to the king, and the pitiful result of this final step.
Her father listened, shaking his head, and said:
"You see if, instead of acting on your own account, you had first asked my advice, you would have saved yourself this fresh sorrow. I could have told you that you would have accomplished nothing with the king."
Now, for the first time in many weeks, the old man again began to speak of the matter which had never ceased to occupy Panna's whole mind. He was choleric, and capable of a hasty deed of violence when excited, but he was not resentful; he was not the man to cherish anger long, and had already gained sufficient calmness to view Abonyi's crime more quietly and soberly. He represented to his daughter that it would be folly to demand the nobleman's life from the king in exchange for Pista's.
Panna answered sullenly that she did not perceive the folly; did her father think that a peasant's life was less valuable than a gentleman's?