Mistress Borcsa screamed, Marcsa grunted, and the pig squealed loudest of all.
"Kill it at once to stop its cries!" cried Sárvölgyi. "What a horrible noise over a pig!"
"Don't kill it! Don't make it squeal while I am listening," exclaimed Borcsa in a terrified passion: then she ran back into the kitchen, and stopped her ears lest she should hear them killing her favorite pig.
She came out again as soon as the squeals of her protêgé had ceased, and with uncontrollable fury took up a position before Sárvölgyi. The gypsy woman smilingly pointed to the murdered innocent.
Mistress Borcsa then said in a panting rage to Sárvölgyi:
"Miser who gives one day, and takes back—a curse upon such as you!"
"Zounds! good-for-nothing!" bawled the righteous fellow. "How dare you say such a thing to me?"
"From to-day I am no longer your servant," said the old woman, trembling with passion. "Here is the cooking-spoon, here the pan: cook your own dinner, for your wife knows less about it than you do. My husband lives in the neighboring village: I left him in his young days because he beat me twice a day; now I shall go back to the honest fellow, even if he beat me thrice a day."
Mistress Borcsa was in reality not jesting, and to prove it she at once gathered up her bed, brought out her trunks, piled all her possessions onto a barrow, and wheeled them out without saying so much as "good bye."
Sárvölgyi tried to prevent this wholesale rebellion forcibly by seizing Mistress Borcsa's arm to hold her back.