which she had taken for love little by little faded mistily away.  It was like a recovery from an illness, or the disappearance of a nightmare in the dawn of morning.  Now, Marsa Laszlo, who, two years before, had longed for annihilation and death, occasionally thought the little Baroness Dinati right when she said, in her laughing voice:  “What are you thinking of, my dear child?  Is it well for a girl of your age to bury herself voluntarily and avoid society?” She was then twenty-four:  in three or four years she had aged mentally ten; but her beautiful oval face had remained unchanged, with the purity of outline of a Byzantine Madonna.

Then—­life has its awakenings—­she met Prince Andras:  all her admirations as a girl, her worship of patriotism and heroism, flamed forth anew; her heart, which she had thought dead, throbbed, as it had never throbbed before, at the sound of the voice of this man, truly loyal, strong and gentle, and who was (she knew it well, the unhappy girl!) the being for whom she was created, the ideal of her dreams.  She loved him silently, but with a deep and eternal passion; she loved him without saying to herself that she no longer had any right to love.  Did she even think of her past?  Does one longer think of the storm when the wind has driven off the heavy, tear-laden clouds, and the thunder has died away in the distance?  It seemed to her now that she had never had but one name in her heart, and upon her lips—­Zilah.

And then this man, this hero, her hero, asked her hand, and said to her, “I love you.”

Andras loved her!  With what a terrible contraction of the heart did she put to herself the formidable question:  “Have I the right to lie?  Shall I have the courage to confess?”

She held in her grasp the most perfect happiness a woman could hope for, the dream of her whole life; and, because a worthless scoundrel had deceived her, because there were, in her past, hours which she remembered only to curse, effaced hours, hours which appeared to her now never to have existed, was she obliged to ruin her life, to break her heart, and, herself the victim, to pay for the lie uttered by a coward?  Was it right?  Was it just?  Was she to be forever bound to that past, like a corpse to its grave?  What!  She had no longer the right to love? no longer the right to live?

She adored Andras; she would have given her life for him.  And he also loved her; she was the first woman who had ever touched his heart.  He had evidently felt himself isolated, with his old chivalrous ideas, in a world devoted to the worship of low things, tangible successes, and profitable realities.  He was, so to speak, a living anachronism in the midst of a society which had faith in nothing except victorious brutalities, and which marched on, crushing, beneath its iron-shod heels, the hopes and visions of the enthusiastic.  He recalled those evenings after a battle when, in the woods reddened by the setting sun, his father and Varhely said to him:  “Let us remain to the last, and protect the retreat!” And it seemed to him that, amid the bestialities of the moment and the vulgarities of the century, he still protected the retreat of misunderstood virtues and generous enthusiasms; and it pleased him to be the rear guard of chivalry in defeat.