Later, the General came, as usual, to bid his niece goodnight.  He found Marsa lying upon the divan in the little salon.

“Don’t you feel well?  What is the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“I feel a little tired, and I was going to bed.  You don’t care to have me keep you company, do you, my dear?”

Sometimes he was affectionate to her, and sometimes he addressed her with timid respect; but Marsa never appeared to notice the difference.

“I prefer to remain alone,” she answered.

The General shrugged his shoulders, bent over, took Marsa’s delicate hand in his, and kissed it as he would have kissed that of a queen.

Left alone, Marsa lay there motionless for more than an hour.  Then she started suddenly, hearing the clock strike eleven, and rose at once.

The domestics had closed the house.  She went out by a back door which was used by the servants, the key of which was in the lock.

She crossed the garden, beneath the dark shadows of the trees, with a slow, mechanical movement, like that of a somnambulist, and proceeded to the kennel, where the great Danish hounds and the colossus of the Himalayas were baying, and rattling their chains.

“Peace, Ortog!  Silence, Duna!”

At the sound of her voice, the noise ceased as by enchantment.

She pushed open the door of the kennel, entered, and caressed the heads of the dogs, as they placed their paws upon her shoulders.  Then she unfastened their chains, and in a clear, vibrating voice, said to them: 

“Go!”

She saw them bound out, run over the lawn, and dash into the bushes, appearing and disappearing like great, fantastic shadows, in the pale moonlight.  Then, slowly, and with the Muscovite indifference which her father, Prince Tchereteff, might have displayed when ordering a spy or a traitor to be shot, she retraced her steps to the house, where all seemed to sleep, murmuring, with cold irony, in a sort of impersonal affirmation, as if she were thinking not of herself, but of another: 

“Now, I hope that Prince Zilah’s fiancee is well guarded!”

CHAPTER XV

“As clings the leaf unto the tree”

Michel Menko was alone in the little house he had hired in Paris, in the Rue d’Aumale.  He had ordered his coachman to have his coupe in readiness for the evening.  “Take Trilby,” he said.  “He is a better horse than Jack, and we have a long distance to go; and take some coverings for yourself, Pierre.  Until this evening, I am at home to no one.”