"Where was your common-sense, Beldi?" he asked himself, tore the letter to pieces, and threw it into the fire. "How the world would have laughed at me!" thought he. "An old fool, to take it into his head all at once to be jealous of the mother of his children!—and for the sake of a kiss too given in drunkenness and rejected with indignation. What a weapon I should have put into Banfi's hands, had I led him to suppose that I was jealous of my wife on his account."
"Let us go to Bodola," said he very gently to his coachman, and with that he took leave of his host.
"But how about that pressing letter of yours?" asked Gyergyai anxiously.
"I have already sent it—up the chimney," replied Beldi, smiling, and set out on his journey with feelings very different from those with which he had started.
So you see a man can be drunk without wine!
While still some distance from Bodola, he could see all the members of his family looking out for him on the castle terrace, and no sooner did they perceive his carriage, than they hastened down to greet him. He met them all in the park, wife and children; they threw themselves on his neck with cries of joy, and he kissed them all, one after another, over and over again; but his warmest embraces were for his darling wife, who smiled up at him with a radiant face, which he could not feast his eyes upon enough. It seemed to him as if her eyes were brighter, her features more enchanting, her lips sweeter than ever they had been.
"What a fool a man is, to be sure," thought Beldi, "who, when his wife is out of sight, is capable of supposing everything bad of her, and when she stands before his eyes cannot make too much of her."
In the abandonment of his joy he did not at first perceive that there was a strange face in the family circle—a handsome, stately young Turk, with frank and noble features, not unlike an Hungarian.
"You do not even notice me, or perhaps you forget me," said the youth, stepping in front of Beldi.
Beldi looked at him. The youth's features were familiar to him, and yet he could not recall his name till his youngest daughter, Aranka, who was dangling on her father's arm, remarked archly—