Again, but alone this time, he drank in the accents of the music of his country, and sought to remember the impression produced upon him when Marsa had played this air or that one, this sad song or that czardas.  He saw her again as she stood on the deck of the steamer, watching the children on the barge as they threw her kisses of farewell.  More troubled than ever, nervous and suffering, Zilah returned home late in the afternoon, opened the desk where he kept Marsa’s letters, and one by one, impelled by some inexplicable sentiment, he burned them, the flame of the candle devouring the paper, whose subtle perfume mounted to his nostrils for the last time like a dying sigh, while the wind carried off, through the window into the infinite, the black dust of those fateful letters, those remnants of dead passion and of love betrayed—­and the past was swept away.

The sun was slowly descending in an atmosphere of fire, while toward Havre a silvery mist over the hills and shore heralded the approach of chaste Dian’s reign.  The reflections of the sunset tinged with red and orange the fishing boats floating over the calm sea, while a long fiery streak marked the water on the horizon, growing narrower and narrower, and changing to orange and then to pale yellow as the disk of the sun gradually disappeared, and the night came on, enveloping the now inactive city, and the man who watched the disappearance of the last fragments of a detested love, of the love of another, of a love which had torn and bruised his heart.  And, strange to say, for some inexplicable reason, Prince Andras Zilah now regretted the destruction of those odious letters.  It seemed to him, with a singular displacement of his personality, that it was something of himself, since it was something of her, that he had destroyed.  He had hushed that voice which said to another, “I love you,” but which caused him the same thrill as if she had murmured the words for him.  They were letters received by his rival which the wind carried out, an impalpable dust, over the sea; and he felt—­such folly is the human heart capable of—­the bitter regret of a man who has destroyed a little of his past.

The shadows crept over him at the same time that they crept over the sea.

“What matters it how much we suffer, or how much suffering we cause,” he murmured, “when, of all our loves, our hearts, ourselves, there remains, after a short lapse of time—­what?  That!” And he watched the last atom of burned paper float away in the deepening twilight.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE STRICKEN SOUL

His loneliness now weighed heavily upon Andras.  His nerves were shaken by the memories which the czardas of the Tzigani musicians had evoked; and it seemed to him that the place was deserted now that they had departed, and Varhely had gone with them.  In the eternal symphony of the sea, the lapping of the waves upon the shingle at the foot of the terrace, one note was now lacking, the resonant note of the czimbalom yonder in the gardens of Frascati.  The vibration of the czimbalom was like a call summoning up the image of Marsa, and this image took invincible possession of the Prince, who, with a sort of sorrowful anger which he regarded as hatred, tried in vain to drive it away.