that ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the
damned quack, the impostor, whom they called a distinguished medical
authority, a celebrated doctor, had basted together--what did it have to
do with _that_ John Bogdan whom Marcsa had promised to marry and
whom she had accompanied to the station crying when he had gone off to
the war? For Marcsa there was only _one_ John Bogdan, the one that
was coachman to the lord of the castle and the handsomest man in the
village. Was he still coachman? The lord would take care not to disgrace
his magnificent pair with such a scarecrow or drive to the county seat
with such a monstrosity on the box. Haying--that's what they would put
him to--cleaning out the dung from the stables. And Marcsa, the
beautiful Marcsa whom all the men were vying for, would she be the wife
of a miserable day laborer?

No, of this John Bogdan was certain, the man sitting on the bench there
was no longer John Bogdan to Marcsa. She would not have him now--no more
than the lord would have him on the coachman's box. A cripple is a
cripple, and Marcsa had engaged herself to John Bogdan, not to the
fright that he was bringing back home to her.

His melancholy gradually gave way to an ungovernable fury against those
people in the city who had given him all that buncombe and talked him
into heaven knows what. Marcsa should be proud because he had been
disfigured in the service of his fatherland. Proud? Ha-ha!

He laughed scornfully, and his fingers tightened convulsively about the
cursed mirror, until the glass broke into bits and cut his hand. The
blood trickled slowly down his sleeves without his noticing it, so great
was his rage against that bunch of aristocratic ladies in the hospital
whose twaddle had deprived him of his reason. They probably thought that