“I have only one objection to make to this marriage,” said Varhely; “it should have taken place sooner.”  But a man can not command his heart to love at a given hour.  When very young, Andras Zilah had cared for scarcely anything but his country; and, far from her, in the bitterness of exile, he had returned to the passion of his youth, living in Paris only upon memories of his Hungary.  He had allowed year after year to roll by, without thinking of establishing a home of his own by marriage.  A little late, but with heart still warm, his spirit young and ardent, and his body strengthened rather than worn out by life, Prince Andras gave to a woman’s keeping his whole being, his soul with his name, the one as great as the other.  He was about to marry a girl of his own choice, whom he loved romantically; and he wished to give a surrounding of poetic gayety to this farewell to the past, this greeting to the future.  The men of his race, in days gone by, had always displayed a gorgeous, almost Oriental originality:  the generous eccentricities of one of Prince Andras’s ancestors, the old Magyar Zilah, were often cited; he it was who made this answer to his stewards, when, figures in hand, they proved to him, that, if he would farm out to some English or German company the cultivation of his wheat, corn, and oats, he would increase his revenue by about six hundred thousand francs a year: 

“But shall I make these six hundred thousand francs from the nourishment of our laborers, farmers, sowers, and gleaners?  No, certainly not; I would no more take that money from the poor fellows than I would take the scattered grains from the birds of the air.”

It was also this grandfather of Andras, Prince Zilah Ferency, who, when he had lost at cards the wages of two hundred masons for an entire year, employed these men in constructing chateaux, which he burned down at the end of the year to give himself the enjoyment of fireworks upon picturesque ruins.

The fortune of the Zilahs was then on a par with the almost fabulous, incalculable wealth of the Esterhazys and Batthyanyis.  Prince Paul Esterhazy alone possessed three hundred and fifty square leagues of territory in Hungary.  The Zichys, the Karolyis and the Szchenyis, poorer, had but two hundred at this time, when only six hundred families were proprietors of six thousand acres of Hungarian soil, the nobles of Great Britain possessing not more than five thousand in England.  The Prince of Lichtenstein entertained for a week the Emperor of Austria, his staff and his army.  Old Ferency Zilah would have done as much if he had not always cherished a profound, glowing, militant hatred of Austria:  never had the family of the magnate submitted to Germany, become the master, any more than it had bent the knee in former times to the conquering Turk.

From his ancestors Prince Andras inherited, therefore, superb liberality, with a fortune greatly diminished by all sorts of losses and misfortunes—­half of it confiscated by Austria in 1849, and enormous sums expended for the national cause, Hungarian emigrants and proscribed compatriots.  Zilah nevertheless remained very rich, and was an imposing figure in Paris, where, some years before, after long journeyings, he had taken up his abode.