Something in the agony of his appeal, something in the pathos of Elsa's defiant attitude must have struck a more gentle cord in the Jewess' heart. The tears gathered in her eyes--tears of self-pity at the misery which she seemed to be strewing all round her with a free hand.
"I don't think that I really meant to tell you, Elsa," she said more quietly, "not lately, at any rate. Oh, I dare say at first I did mean to hurt you--but a month has gone by and I was beginning to forget. People used to say of me that I was a good sort--it was the hurt that _he_ did me that seems to have made a devil of me. . . . And then--just now when I saw the other folk coming home in the procession and noticed that you and Andor weren't among them, I guessed that you would be walking back together arm-in-arm--and that the whole world would be smiling on you both, while I was eating out my heart in misery."
She was speaking with apparent calm now, in a dull and monotonous voice, her eyes fixed upon the distant line of the horizon, where the glowing sun had at last sunk to rest. The brilliant orange and blood-red of the sky had yielded to a colder crimson tint--it, too, was now slowly turning to grey.
Elsa stood silent, listening, and Andor no longer tried to force Klara to silence. What was the good? Fate had spoken through her lips--God's wrath, perhaps, had willed it so. For the first time in all these weeks he realized that perhaps he had committed a deadly sin, and that he had had no right to reckon on happiness coming to him, because of it. He stood there, dazed, letting the Jewess have her way. What did it matter how much more she said? Perhaps, on the whole, it was best that Elsa should learn the whole truth now.
And Klara continued to speak in listless, apathetic tones, letting her tongue run on as if she had lost control over what she said, and as if a higher Fate was forcing her to speak against her will.
"I suppose," she said thoughtfully, "that some kind of devil did get into my bones then. I wandered out into the stubble, and I saw you together coming from the distance. The sunlight was full upon you, and long before you saw me I saw your faces quite distinctly. There was so much joy, so much happiness in you both, that I seemed to see it shining out of your eyes. And I was so broken and so wretched that I couldn't bear to see Andor so happy with the girl who rightly belonged to Béla--the wretched man whom he himself had sent to his death."
