“We resemble,” he said to Varhely, “those emigrants who never unpack their boxes, certain that they are soon to return home.  They wait, and some day, catching a glimpse of themselves in a glass, they are amazed to find wrinkles and gray hairs.”

No longer having a home in his own country, Prince Andras had never dreamed of making another abroad.  He hired the sumptuous hotel he inhabited at the top of the Champs Elysees, when houses were rather scattered there.  Fashion, and the ascensional movement of Paris toward the Arc de Triomphe, had come to seek him.  His house was rich in beautiful pictures and rare books, and he sometimes received there his few real friends, his companions in troublous times, like Varhely.  He was generally considered a little of a recluse, although he loved society and showed himself, during the winter, at all entertainments where, by virtue of his fame and rank, he would naturally be expected to be present.  But he carried with him a certain melancholy and gravity, which contrasted strongly with the frivolous trivialities and meaningless smiles of our modern society.  In the summer, he usually passed two months at the seashore, where Varhely frequently joined him; and upon the leafy terrace of the Prince’s villa the two friends had long and confidential chats, as they watched the sun sink into the sea.

Andras had never thought of marrying.  At first, he had a sort of feeling that he was doomed to an early death, ever expecting a renewal of the struggle with Austria; and he thought at that time that the future would bring to him his father’s fate—­a ball in the forehead and a ditch.  Then, without knowing it, he had reached and passed his fortieth year.

“Now it is too late,” he said, gayly.  “The psychological moment is long gone by.  We shall both end old bachelors, my good Varhely, and spend our evenings playing checkers, that mimic warfare of old men.”

“Yes, that is all very well for me, who have no very famous name to perpetuate; but the Zilahs should not end with you.  I want some sturdy little hussar whom I can teach to sit a horse, and who also will call me his good old Yanski.”

The Prince smiled, and then replied, gravely, almost sadly:  “I greatly fear that one can not love two things at once; the heart is not elastic.  I chose Hungary for my bride, and my life must be that of a widower.”

In the midst of the austere and thoughtful life he led, Andras preserved, nevertheless, a sort of youthful buoyancy.  Many men of thirty were less fresh in mind and body than he.  He was one of those beings who die, as they have lived, children:  even the privations of the hardest kind of an existence can not take away from them that purity and childlike trust which seem to be an integral part of themselves, and which, although they may be betrayed, deceived and treated harshly by life, they never wholly lose; very manly and heroic in time of need and danger, they are by nature peculiarly exposed to treasons and deceptions which astonish but do not alter them.  Since man, in the progress of time, must either harden or break to pieces, the hero in them is of iron; but, on the other hand, their hearts are easily wounded by the cruel hand of some woman or the careless one of a child.