He had, doubtless, believed that he had perceived in her a tender feeling toward himself which had emboldened him to ask her to be his wife.  But had he been deceived?  Was it only the soldier in him that had pleased Marsa?  Was he about to suffer a terrible disappointment?  Ah, what folly to love, and to love at forty years, a young and beautiful girl like Marsa!

Still, she made him no answer, but sat there before him like a statue, pale to the lips, her dark eyes fixed on him in a wild, horrified stare.

Then, as he pressed her, with tears in his voice, to speak, she forced her almost paralyzed tongue to utter a response which fell, cruel as a death-sentence, upon the heart of the hero: 

“Never!”

Andras stood motionless before her in such terrible stillness that she longed to throw herself at his feet and cry out:  “I love you!  I love you!  But your wife—­no, never!”

She loved him?  Yes, madly-better than that, with a deep, eternal passion, a passion solidly anchored in admiration, respect and esteem; with an unconquerable attraction toward what represented, to her harassed soul, honor without a blemish, perfect goodness in perfect courage, the immolation of a life to duty, all incarnate in one man, radiant in one illustrious name—­Zilah.

And Andras himself divined something of this feeling; he felt that Marsa, despite her enigmatical refusal, cared for him in a way that was something more than friendship; he was certain of it.  Then, why did she command him thus with a single word to despair?  “Never!” She was not free, then?  And a question, for which he immediately asked her pardon by a gesture, escaped, like the appeal of a drowning man, from his lips: 

“Do you love some one else, Marsa?”

She uttered a cry.

“No!  I swear to you—­no!”

He urged her, then, to explain what was the meaning of her refusal, of the fright she had just shown; and, in a sort of nervous hysteria which she forced herself to control, in the midst of stifled sobs, she told him that if she could ever consent to unite herself to anyone, it would be to him, to him alone, to the hero of her country, to him whose chivalrous devotion she had admired long before she knew him, and that now—­And here she stopped short, just on the brink of an avowal.

“Well, now?  Now?” demanded Andras, awaiting the word which, in her overstrung condition, Marsa had almost spoken.  “Now?”

But she did not speak these words which Zilah begged for with newly awakened hope.  She longed to end this interview which was killing her, and in broken accents asked him to excuse her, to forgive her—­but she was really ill.

“But if you are suffering, I can not, I will not leave you.”

“I implore you.  I need to be alone.”

“At least you will permit me to come to-morrow, Marsa, and ask for your answer?”

“My answer?  I have given it to you.”