At all events, a man’s death did not lie between her and Zilah.  Michel Menko, after lying at death’s door, was cured of his wounds.  She knew this from Baroness Dinati, who attributed Michel’s illness to a sword wound secretly received for some woman.  This was the rumor in Paris.  The young Count had, in fact, closed his doors to every one; and no one but his physician had been admitted.  What woman could it be?  The little Baroness could not imagine.

Marsa thought again, with a shudder, of the night when the dogs howled; but, to tell the truth, she had no remorse.  She had simply defended herself!  The inquiry begun by the police had ended in no definite result.  At Maisons-Lafitte, people thought that the Russian house had been attacked by some thieves who had been in the habit of entering unoccupied houses and rifling them of their contents.  They had even arrested an old vagabond, and accused him of the attempted robbery at General Vogotzine’s; but the old man had answered:  “I do not even know the house.”  But was not this Menko a hundred times more culpable than a thief?  It was more and worse than money or silver that he had dared to come for:  it was to impose his love upon a woman whose heart he had well-nigh broken.  Against such an attack all weapons were allowable, even Ortog’s teeth.  The dogs of the Tzigana had known how to defend her; and it was what she had expected from her comrades.

Had Michel Menko died, Marsa would have said, with the fatalism of the Orient:  “It was his own will!” She was grateful, however, to fate, for having punished the wretch by letting him live.  Then she thought no more of him except to execrate him for having poisoned her happiness, and condemned her either to a silence as culpable as a lie, or to an avowal as cruel as a suicide.

The night passed and the day came at last, when it was necessary for Marsa to become the wife of Prince Andras, or to confess to him her guilt.  She wished that she had told him all, now that she had not the courage to do so.  She had accustomed herself to the idea that a woman is not necessarily condemned to love no more because she has encountered a coward who has abused her love.  She was in an atmosphere of illusion and chimera; what was passing about her did not even seem to exist.  Her maids dressed her, and placed upon her dark hair the bridal veil:  she half closed her eyes and murmured: 

“It is a beautiful dream.”

A dream, and yet a reality, consoling as a ray of light after a hideous nightmare.  Those things which were false, impossible, a lie, a phantasmagoria born of a fever, were Michel Menko, the past years, the kisses of long ago, the threats of yesterday, the bayings of the infuriated dogs at that shadow which did not exist.

General Vogotzine, in a handsome uniform, half suffocated in his high vest, and with a row of crosses upon his breast—­the military cross of St. George, with its red and black ribbon; the cross of St. Anne, with its red ribbon; all possible crosses—­was the first to knock at his niece’s door, his sabre trailing upon the floor.