But the most bewildered, in her mute amazement, was Marsa, her lips trembling, her face ashen, her eyes fixed upon the Prince, as she leaned against the marble of the mantelpiece to prevent herself from falling, but longing to throw herself on her knees before this man who had suddenly appeared, and who was master of her destiny.

“You here?” said Varhely at last.  “You followed me, then?”

“No,” said Andras.  “The one whom I expected to find here was not you.”

“Who was it, then?”

“Michel Menko!”

Yanski Varhely turned toward Marsa.

She did not stir; she was looking at the Prince.

“Michel Menko is dead,” responded Varhely, shortly.  “It was to announce that to the Princess Zilah that I am here.”

Andras gazed alternately upon the old Hungarian, and upon Marsa, who stood there petrified, her whole soul burning in her eyes.

“Dead?” repeated Zilah, coldly.

“I fought and killed him,” returned Varhely.

Andras struggled against the emotion which seized hold of him.  Pale as death, he turned from Varhely to the Tzigana, with an instinctive desire to know what her feelings might be.

The news of this death, repeated thus before the man whom she regarded as the master of her existence, had, apparently, made no impression upon her, her thoughts being no longer there, but her whole heart being concentrated upon the being who had despised her, hated her, fled from her, and who appeared there before her as in one of her painful dreams in which he returned again to that very house where he had cursed her.

“There was,” continued Varhely, slowly, “a martyr who could not raise her head, who could not live, so long as that man breathed.  First of all, I came to her to tell her that she was delivered from a detested past.  Tomorrow I should have informed a man whose honor is my own, that the one who injured and insulted him has paid his debt.”

With lips white as his moustache, Varhely spoke these words like a judge delivering a solemn sentence.

A strange expression passed over Zilah’s face.  He felt as if some horrible weight had been lifted from his heart.

Menko dead!

Yet there was a time when he had loved this Michel Menko:  and, of the three beings present in the little salon, the man who had been injured by him was perhaps the one who gave a pitying thought to the dead, the old soldier remaining as impassive as an executioner, and the Tzigana remembering only the hatred she had felt for the one who had been her ruin.

Menko dead!

Varhely took from the mantelpiece the despatch he had sent from Florence, three days before, to the Princess Zilah, the one of which Vogotzine had spoken to Andras.

He handed it to the Prince, and Andras read as follows: 

“I am about to risk my life for you.  Tuesday evening either I shall be at Maisons-Lafitte, or I shall be dead.  I fight tomorrow with Count M. If you do not see me again, pray for the soul of Varhely.”