“Prince?”

He repeated in amazement this title which she suddenly gave him; she, who called him Andras, as he called her Marsa.  Prince?  He also, in his turn, felt a singular sensation of fright, wondering what that package contained, and if Marsa’s fate and his own were not connected with some unknown thing within it.

“Let us see,” he said, abruptly breaking the seals, “what this is.”

Rapidly, and as if impelled, despite herself, Marsa caught the wrist of her husband in her icy hand, and, terrified, supplicating, she cried, in a wild, broker voice: 

“No, no, I implore you!  No!  Do not read it!  Do not read it!”

He contemplated her coldly, and, forcing himself to be calm, asked: 

“What does this parcel of Michel Menko’s contain?”

“I do not know,” gasped Marsa.  “But do not read it!  In the name of the Virgin” (the sacred adjuration of the Hungarians occurring to her mind, in the midst of her agony), “do not read it!”

“But you must be aware, Princess,” returned Andras, “that you are taking the very means to force me to read it.”

She shivered and moaned, there was such a change in the way Andras pronounced this word, which he had spoken a moment before in tones so loving and caressing—­Princess.

Now the word threatened her.

“Listen!  I am about to tell you:  I wished—­Ah!  My God!  My God!  Unhappy woman that I am!  Do not read, do not read!”

Andras, who had turned very pale, gently removed her grasp from the package, and said, very slowly and gravely, but with a tenderness in which hope still appeared: 

“Come, Marsa, let us see; what do you wish me to think?  Why do you wish me not to read these letters? for letters they doubtless are.  What have letters sent me by Count Menko to do with you?  You do not wish me to read them?”

He paused a moment, and then, while Marsa’s eyes implored him with the mute prayer of a person condemned to death by the executioner, he repeated: 

“You do not wish me to read them?  Well, so be it; I will not read them, but upon one condition:  you must swear to me, understand, swear to me, that your name is not traced in these letters, and that Michel Menko has nothing in common with the Princess Zilah.”

She listened, she heard him; but Andras wondered whether she understood, she stood so still and motionless, as if stupefied by the shock of a moral tempest.

“There is, I am certain,” he continued in the same calm, slow voice, “there is within this envelope some lie, some plot.  I will not even know what it is.  I will not ask you a single question, and I will throw these letters, unread, into the fire; but swear to me, that, whatever this Menko, or any other, may write to me, whatever any one may say, is an infamy and a calumny.  Swear that, Marsa.”

“Swear it, swear again?  Swear always, then?  Oath upon oath?  Ah! it is too much!” she cried, her torpor suddenly breaking into an explosion of sobs and cries.  “No! not another lie, not one!  Monsieur, I am a wretch, a miserable woman!  Strike me!  Lash me, as I lash my dogs!  I have deceived you!  Despise me!  Hate me!  I am unworthy even of pity!  The man whose letters you hold revenges himself, and stabs me, has been—­my lover!”