Well! if Menko were dead?

When he feverishly asked himself this question, Zilah recalled at the same time Marsa, crouching at his feet, and giving no other excuse than this:  “I loved you!  I wished to belong to you, to be your wife!”

His wife!  Yes, the beautiful Tzigana he had met at Baroness Dinati’s was now his wife!  He could punish or pardon.  But he had punished, since he had inflicted upon her that living death—­insanity.  And he asked himself whether he should not pardon Princess Zilah, punished, repentant, almost dying.

He knew that she was now at Maisons, cured of her insanity, but still ill and feeble, and that she lived there like a nun, doing good, dispensing charity, and praying—­praying for him, perhaps.

For him or for Menko?

No, for him!  She was not vile enough to have lied, when she asked, implored, besought death from Zilah who held her life or death in his hands.

“Yes, I had the right to kill her, but—­I have the right to pardon also,” thought Zilah.

Ah, if Menko were dead!

The Prince gradually wrought himself into a highly nervous condition, missing Varhely, uneasy at his prolonged absence, and never succeeding in driving away Marsa’s haunting image.  He grew to hate his solitary home and his books.

“I shall not want any breakfast,” he said one morning to his valet; and, going out, he descended the Champs-Elysees on foot.

At the corner of the Place de la Madeleine, he entered a restaurant, and sat down near a window, gazing mechanically at this lively corner of Paris, at the gray facade of the church, the dusty trees, the asphalt, the promenaders, the yellow omnibuses, the activity of Parisian life.

All at once he was startled to hear his name pronounced and to see before him, with his hand outstretched, as if he were asking alms, old General Vogotzine, who said to him, timidly: 

“Ah, my dear Prince, how glad I am to see you!  I was breakfasting over there, and my accursed paper must have hidden me.  Ouf!  If you only knew!  I am stifling!”

“Why, what is the matter?” asked Andras.

“Matter?  Look at me!  I must be as red as a beet!”

Poor Vogotzine had entered the restaurant for breakfast, regretting the cool garden of Maisons-Lafitte, which, now that Marsa no longer sat there, he had entirely to himself.  After eating his usual copious breakfast, he had imprudently asked the waiter for a Russian paper; and, as he read, and sipped his kummel, which he found a little insipid and almost made him regret the vodka of his native land, his eyes fell upon a letter from Odessa, in which there was a detailed description of the execution of three nihilists, two of them gentlemen.  It told how they were dragged, tied to the tails of horses, to the open square, each of them bearing upon his breast a white placard with this inscription, in black letters:  “Guilty of high treason.”