"Couldn't you have anticipated them?"
Melanie clasped her hands on her breast, and said with the astonishment of moral aversion:
"How? By doing so I should have swindled them."
Czipra recollected herself.
"True; you are right."
Czipra helped Melanie to put her things in the cupboards. With a woman's critical eye, she examined everything. She found the linen not fine enough, though the work on it pleased her well. That was Melanie's own handiwork. As regards books, there was only one in the trunk, a prayer-book. Czipra opened it and looked into it. There were steel plates in it. The portrait of a beautiful woman, seven stars round her head, raising her tear-stained eyes to Heaven: and the picture of a kneeling youth, round the fair bowed head of whom the light of Heaven was pouring. Long did she gaze at the pictures. Who could those figures be?
There were no jewels at all among the new-comer's treasures.
Czipra remarked that Melanie's ear-rings were missing.
"You have left your earrings behind too?" she asked, hiding any want of tenderness in the question by delivering it in a whisper.
"Our solicitor told me," said Melanie, with downcast eyes, "that those earrings also were paid for by creditors' money:—and he was right. I gave them to him."