Aranka kissed her friend over and over again when she had read this letter, and then she suddenly grew sad.
"Oh, my letter is not nearly so pretty, I am ashamed to show it to you."
Flora looked at her friend with gentle bashfulness as Aranka handed over her letter, and blushed like a red rose all the time she was perusing it.
"Noble-hearted Feriz!
"When we were both children you maintained that you loved me (here she inserted within brackets: 'like a sister,' and a good thing for her that she did put these three words in brackets). If you still recollect what you said, now is the time to prove it. My dearest friend, Mariska Sturdza, is at Buda, a prisoner in the hands of Hassan Pasha. My only hope of her deliverance depends on you. I have heard such splendid things of you. If you see her, for whom I now implore you, with a sad face and tearful eyes, think how I should look if I were there, and if you give her back to me, and I can embrace her again, and look into her smiling eyes, then I will think of you, too.
"Aranka Béldi."
The girls entrusted these letters to faithful servants, sending the first letter to Temesvár, where Tököly was then residing, and the second to Feriz Beg, who, as we know, lay ill at Buda.
The news first reached Tököly at supper-time. On receiving the letter and reading it through, he at once put down his glass, girded on his sword, and telling his comrades that he was about to take a little stroll, he mounted his horse and vanished from the town.
Feriz was lying half-delirious on his carpet. His health mended but slowly, as is often the case with men of strong constitutions, and the tidings of the smallest disaster which befell the Turks threw him into such a state of excitement that a relapse was incessantly to be feared, so that at last they would not allow any messages at all to be brought to him, for even when they brought good news to him he always managed to look at them from the worst side, so that news of any kind was absolute poison to him. At last his Greek physician made it a rule to read every letter addressed to his patient beforehand; and if it contained the least disturbing element, he let Feriz know nothing at all about it. What especially annoyed Feriz were any letters from women, and these were simply sent back.
Thus Aranka's letter might very easily have had the fate of being suppressed altogether had it not been entrusted to Master Gregory Biró, a shrewd and famous Szekler courier, whose honourable peculiarity it was to go wherever he was sent, and do whatsoever he was told, be the obstacles in the way what they might. If he had been told to give something to the Sultan of Turkey, he would have wormed his way to him somehow—all inquiries, all threats would have been in vain; he would have insisted on seeing and speaking to him if his head had to be cut off the next moment.