'I see. Well, when you come and see me you shall have some real riding, on wild horses if you like;' and he told the child stories of the great Magyar steppes, and the herds of young horses, and the infinite delight of the unending gallop over the wide hushed plain; and all the while his heart ached bitterly, and the sight of the child—who was her child, yet had that stranger's face—was to him like a jagged steel being turned and twisted inside a bleeding wound. Bela, however, was captivated by the new visions that rose before him.
'Bela will come to Hungary,' he said with condescension, and then with an added thought, continued: 'I think Bela has great lands there. Otto said so.'
'Bela has nothing at all,' said Sabran, sternly. 'Bela talks great nonsense sometimes, and it would be better he should go to sleep with his brother.'
Bela looked up shyly under his golden cloud of hair. 'Folko is Bela's,' he said under his breath. Folko was his pony.
'No,' said Sabran; 'Folko belongs to your mother. She only allows you to have him so long as you are good to him.'
'Bela is always good to him,' he said decidedly.
'Bela is faultless in his own estimation,' said his mother, with a smile. 'He is too little to be wise enough to see himself as he is.'
This view made Bela's blue eyes open very wide and fill very sorrowfully. It was humiliating. He longed to get back to Gela, who always listened to him dutifully, and never said anything in answer except an entirely acquiescent 'Ja! ja!' which was indeed about the limitation of Gela's lingual powers. In a few moments, indeed, his governess came for him and took him away, a little dainty figure in his ivory velvet and his blue silk stockings, with his long golden curls hanging to his waist.
'It is so difficult to keep him from being spoilt,' she said, as the door closed on him. 'The people make a little prince, a little god, of him. He believes himself to be something wonderful. Gela, who is so gentle and quiet, is left quite in the shade.'
'I suppose Gela takes your title?' said Vàsàrhely to his host. 'It is usual with the Austrian families for the second son to have some distant appellation?'